Mass vaccination is a show of American might

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. Whereas South Korean public-health officials supplemented the country’s contact-tracing system with credit-card and phone-location data to help keep case numbers down, nobody in the United States has enough faith in government contact tracers to make those kinds of data available in the first place. That difference was reflected in domestic registers of satisfaction with government performance. It also contributed to an international perception of American decline. 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. Mass production of vaccines, mass distribution of vaccines, “mass vax” centers in stadium parking lots, even string quartets playing for the 10,000 New Yorkers getting their vaccines every day at the Javits Center—all of this we can do, now that we have a president who wants to do it. With zero percent interest rates and the deficit a term belonging to the distant past, Americans can also throw money at problems like nobody else. The result isn’t always pretty. In many states, even eligible people seeking a vaccination appointment have had to play an online version of the Hunger Games. Attempts to create some kind of logical order to the distribution process fell victim to overcomplicated criteria, cheating, and the proliferation of registration websites. But once the federal government entered the arena, much of that ceased to be relevant. If you are delivering 4 million vaccine doses a day, it matters less who goes first, because everyone who wants a shot is going to get one soon enough. Although some local drives have been tailored to particular communities—efforts to vaccinate Native Americans have been one of the underappreciated successes—the experience, for many people, has resembled nothing so much as shopping at a remarkably efficient big-box retailer: customers in, customers out, no time for neighborly chitchat, but everyone gets the product they wanted. Instead of orderly distribution, we got speed, which amounts to the same thing.