That particular point gets almost 30 paragraphs of elaboration starting at the heading "Our yearlong journey to Mars".
There is conflict, political and otherwise, in other nations. Yet somehow they were able to mask up and reduce public interaction. For the good of the public, the public needed to do something the public would prefer not to do, and in dozens of nations, the public did it. TFA is too USA-conservative to notice why.
In USA our rulers are not accustomed to bargaining with the public, because our unions are moribund. In other nations, not only unions but other collective powers as well are regularly heard by the government. In such a situation, it's obvious that people expected to stay in their homes without working need some money in order to that. That's not obvious to our politicians, because they're too busy stealing all they can for their billionaire masters. People without years of salary in the bank find their situations untenable. In other nations they would be fine.
Seriously? It took two days [citation needed] to do some chemistry, but the rest of the time making sure that that chemistry had resulted in what was actually a valid and safe vaccine against the disease. And ramping up production is hard, and you don't want to scale up the wrong lab bench process too soon.