Read farther down, where the article elaborates on the short numbered points such as the one that the person you are replying to quoted.

That particular point gets almost 30 paragraphs of elaboration starting at the heading "Our yearlong journey to Mars".

Somehow I skimmed past that one... frankly this undermines TFA. We didn't know in February (with all the suspiciously-timed reports of mutations, do we really know now?) that this vaccine was so effective. We did know that respiratory illnesses are spread when people breathe on each other. Every other nation on earth (maybe there were exceptions, but I don't care) figured out how to get people in masks (and how to get people tested!) Why not us? TFA would like Trump to take credit for saving the rest of the world through reverse psychology, but that's goofy, and besides it emphasizes conflict more than necessary.

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.