Social Trust, Logistics, and the Vaccination Race

A new key to covid success: Not states but societies
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/a-new-key-to-covid-success-not-states-but-societies/2021/04/08/31142d74-98a7-11eb-a6d0-13d207aadb78_story.html
 
What America’s Vaccination Campaign Proves to the World
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/mass-vaccination-show-american-might/618559/
Anne Applebaum notes:
“During 2020, Donald Trump’s chaotic, mendacious response to the pandemic; the wave of COVID-19 denialism that swept across America; and the high U.S. death rates were a shock to anyone, anywhere, who still expected competent American leadership. …
The U.S. became an outlier, even among democracies. A clear line emerged between countries that had high levels of social trust and decent public-health systems—Taiwan, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea—and those, including the U.S. and Brazil, that did not. …
But if the United States is very, very bad at social trust and public-health systems, it is very, very good at large-scale logistics. And skill at large-scale logistics, far more than social trust, has turned out to be a big advantage in this new stage of the pandemic”.