We likely won’t see any real retrospectives for another 5-10 years. It’s still too raw and difficult to process the reality, as you can see in some of the other responses.

We realistically won’t see a good retrospective until the political leaders in 2020 have exited the political scene. Until then reactions to Covid stuff will just be a culture war reflex response of self-preservation.

There are many covid counterfactuals we'll never know the answer to, but personally, I wish we could see the timeline where Trump won the election. Would the vaccination positions have been completely flipped? Pre-election you had democrat leaders saying things like "I wouldn't take a Trump vaccine." If we could only see that play out, I think it would expose how arbitrary much of the US political division really is.

Or similarly what if Clinton wins in 2016, and gets stuck with the mess and cratering economy in her re-election campaign.

This seems very inconsistent with what I remember. "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine" is completely incongruent with the fact that the vast majority of "the gubment can't make me wear a mask or take a vaccine" were in the middle of trump country. Trump got boo'd for promoting the vaccine after he lost. They would have been just as anti-gubment regardless. There was a brief period of time I heard "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine", but that was about a month or two before the election. It completely disappeared as soon as it was obvious that the FDA wasn't going to let trump circumvent basic safety controls to push a vaccine in 6 months (before the election) instead of 12 months (after the election).

>>re-election you had democrat leaders saying things like "I wouldn't take a Trump vaccine."

>This seems very inconsistent with what I remember.

Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all saying they won't trust any Trump vaccine <https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...>

>There was a brief period of time I heard "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine", but that was about a month or two before the election.

Ah, this is you doing some searching, realizing that TechBro8615 is right, and trying to justify what you had already written.

There was a period of time where the political rhetoric was definitely going in that direction. If I remember correctly, it was when Trump was trying to get it fast tracked before the election and people were freaking out about that. Which, given the circumstances, is kind of understandable.

Personally, I read the study data for it (and for some of the other 150+ vaccines that had been attempted), and figured I'd go for it when it was available. Which took forever.

The US partisan divide, yes. Actual US political division between left and right wing politics is around and was not going to change for people on the left (not just socially on the left or in the US bubble of how many confuse liberalism and leftism).

I find it curious that you have to take out of context statements to paint this as “both sides”. The Democratic Party position on vaccines didn’t change. There was a lack of trust in Trump not vaccines or science. This would be much more obvious if you’d use an actual quote instead of paraphrasing to obfuscate the meaning.

"Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. And it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about. I will not take his word for it. He wants us to inject bleach. I — no, I will not take his word."

"If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it. Absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it."

The difficult thing for the USA is that we treat healthcare as a profit center. This leads to focusing on efficiencies instead of extra capacity. You don't want extra beds, unless you have a pandemic. There aren't hospital beds as a services.

If you have government funded healthcare, you only want enough capacity for average needs because otherwise you're wasting taxpayer money.

Now use that same argument about military spending…

Except we actually did make that extra capacity in several parts of the country in March 2020, those extra beds went almost entirely unused, were quietly disassembled in April 2020, and everyone forgot they existed.