Countries like Japan and Taiwan have cultures of cooperation and listening to authorities during normal times that serve to protect the entire society in times of crisis. Americans' individuality doesn't work as well as we thought even for protecting individuals.

American individuality works well for inventing vaccines though. Any covid vaccines that have come out of Japan or Taiwan? Japan has a substantial pharmaceutical industry.

Given that the majority of vaccines were invented in less-individualistic countries (including not one, but two that were developed in China, the first one from nonindividualistic Russia, and the more innovative ones coming from non-quite-as-individualistic Europe with Germany's Biontech-Pfizer or the british-swedish Astrazeneca), that is not a good argument.

The Chinese and Russian vaccine use well established technologies, nothing particularly new. There's no mRNA vaccines developed in China or Russia or Japan or Taiwan. There's also quite a bit of questioning the effectiveness of Russian and Chinese vaccines.

Japan especially coldly treated vaccine development, due to historical and ongoing misunderstood issue.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Japan-depends-...

HPV vaccine case: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-hpv-vaccine-study-i...