The latter part doesn't follow logically from the first. It can be that performance is essentially random, or determined by geographical factors, or by the pre-existing health of the population, and so on. The assumption that governments can control respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 is at the heart of all of this but needs very strong evidential support, given how strong the evidence against this belief is by now.

If you look at the data then there are no obvious explanations for why some countries did better than others. It's far from insane to observe this. There are a lot of plausible sounding explanations but they all fall apart due to exceptions, e.g. Japan did very little for a long time and yet has hardly been affected. In fact Asia in general has not been strongly affected (Taiwan is another example) despite a wide variety of response severities, which raises the question of whether Australia/New Zealand's relatively good performance is due to location rather than behaviour. Meanwhile Latin America was very hard hit despite some truly totalitarian responses by the authorities.

Your own explanation is especially weak because it appears to be based on a cartoon New York Times interpretation of what happened outside the USA. The British government's messaging was the polar opposite of Trump's. The PM appeared next to two chief scientists every single day, and the government was basically replaced by SAGE, the scientific advisory board. The SAGE scientists took total control of the messaging including designing large scale ad campaigns specifically designed by behavioral psychologists to provoke as much fear as possible in the population. The UK also has by far the highest vaccine uptake in the world. The whole thing had a singular focus, the messaging was very well organized to an extent that evokes people's worst fears of competent totalitarianism and so the idea that the UK was somehow doing the same things as Trump just has no basis in reality.

Yet, in the end, it didn't seem to matter. Sweden has had lower excess deaths despite consistent year-long messaging of chill, relax, it's no big deal. Hence, politics can be pretty conclusively eliminated as the source of any differences.

Anybody who thinks the UK represents competent totalitarianism needs to really think about where they are getting their news from. The UK's response was objectively worse than similar countries, in that more people died per capita, and this was because of two late lockdowns, both late because top politicians ignored scientific advice.

The success of the vaccine rollout is arguably the result of the government's procurement efforts, but also deserving of credit are the UK population (overwhelmingly non-skeptical), and the NHS, which allows for a highly organized and centralized rollout.

As for your cited quote, would you like me to cite the thousands of other things government leaders have said over the course of the year that support my point? Yes, the PM is a naturally optimistic guy. None of the people around him are, and they've all been ramping the fear factor to 11 continuously, and in particular they controlled the public messaging not the PM. With the result that there is now a serious problem in the UK with people who are afraid to leave their own homes.

Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics.

Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the middle of one of the UK waves was about as dangerous as regularly riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

You seem frankly a bit divorced from reality. If you go to a chart of the daily incidence rate before either the first or the second wave, then mark on it when the lockdowns occurred, it's clearly visible that they occurred too late.

I had to discourage my at-risk mother from going to a choral Christmas concert last year, at a time when they were clocking 40,000 new cases every day and that number was doubling every few days. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was, and at the time, conservative ministers were still going on TV and talking about a five day christmas.

If you go to the deaths graph, you can see that as a result of this awful mistake, tens of thousands of people died. This is plainly visible in the statistics. Whatever political axe you have to grind is frankly irrelevant, and to be honest, facetious.

You can also look at the different performance of US states (none) despite very different measures.

That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was

In other words you were terrified and forced that fear on your family, based on a mis-understanding of how to use data to draw scientific conclusions. And now you're accusing anyone who points out the truth to you of political axe grinding, although it's you who just threw in a random mention of "conservative ministers" implying their politics is responsible for lots of deaths. That's a political talking point!

Vaccine skepticism isn't based on a question or challenge towards experts - questions or challenges exist within a specific framework, a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it is based on a challenge to the value and nature of expertise itself. As such, it's absolutely compatible with docility, totalitarianism, and antipathy towards questioning. In fact, since experts are experts by virtue of their existence within a specific body of knowledge, they are always by their very nature open to questions and challenges. Attacking the idea of expertise can as such be a way of attacking these areas of open questioning and challenge.

A good example of this is how authoritarian governments are typically hostile to academic institutions.

there are a plethora of open questions in vaccine science and epidemiological policy that naturally allow for skepticism. it’s not only political or partisan. you can strip away the political and still be left with plenty valid skepticism.

and yes, skepticism challenges the notion of expertise itself. it suggests humility is undervalued, that an ‘expert’ knows so little against the backdrop of the world’s knowledge (much less the world itself), especially when the ego becomes intertwined with the ideological. experts over time trend toward surety rather than openness and inquiry, especially as stature rises in a field. it’s so common that the out-of-touch know-it-all is a storytelling caricature.

while it’s not always a valid line of attack, questioning the basis of “expertise” can certainly unveil erroneous assumptions, poor methodology/data, and faulty reasoning. the raison d'être of skepticism is to push knowledge forward, not hold it back, and this sort of challenge is just as valid as any other in this regard.

finally, authoritarian governments are hostile toward academic institutions due to concerns over its power and legitimacy as embodied by... skepticism (of the state and its propaganda).