Do I need to start this article out recapping COVID like everybody hasn’t been living through it for over a year? Everyone already knows the international scale of death and destruction caused by the Coronavirus pandemic already. To recap it now would be beating a dead horse.

One interesting note about the pandemic though, is the cultural movement into a far more nihilistic outlook on the future as a whole. Many people were under the impression that the pandemic wouldn’t start to disappear for years, if it did at all, but suddenly, things started to turn around.

Vaccinations have been helping us fight the pandemic at a more effective rate than most would have guessed. Biden made a promise to vaccinate 100 million Americans in the first 100 days. So he must be responsible for the vaccine rollout?

Not completely. Biden is a standard neoliberal president, similar to that of Macrón in France or Merkel in Germany, yet we are outperforming them with administered doses by around 10%. 

In fact, many characteristics of the US should leave us at a disadvantage compared to other first world countries. We may have the most total wealth of any country, but our population is far more spread out than any country in Europe aside from Russia.

We also have an issue with conspiracy theorists who would let their Grandmas die so they can LARP out their fantasies, screeching like incoherent buffoons about how George Soros is using the vaccine to give them cancer, or whatever delusional fantasy half the GOP is enthralled with this week.

So with a country ran by a fairly underwhelming status quo president, that isn’t easily traversed, and is filled with ridiculous manchildren refusing to follow common sense because logic and coherence has essentially become a “liberal plot to destroy the west”, we should be reduced to ashes, but we’re thriving.

One could argue that Trump may be responsible for this vaccine rollout, and there is weight to that claim. Biden may have been the one to respond to the issue in a competent way and form a plan, but anyone who followed Trump would’ve done the same.

To say Trump was a failure in his response to COVID would be an understatement. He lied about how severe it could get, he pushed people away from wearing masks outside, he let states stay open so he can make the economy look better than it was, and he casually played favorites and cast out states that didn’t vote for him.

To use an argument often touted by accelerationists, the reason we’re recovering faster than most other countries is because we’ve experienced the hardship of incompetence during the virus. Countries like Sweden that never really experience bad conditions are being hit the hardest because they have no idea on how to handle this virus. Trump brought us to the brink of destruction and now we are recovering because Biden and the American people knew we needed a change.