There is much those 18th century inventors would have appreciated. U.S. companies developed or co-developed three vaccines at breakneck speed. Government officials approved them in record time. Taxpayers helped fund them directly and indirectly. (Note there were vaccine attempts that failed in trial, too, and dropped, mostly without recrimination. This is good. This is science.) City services went digital overnight so that building permits could be secured and unemployment benefits applied for. States found new ways to communicate with residents. In many instances, governors “followed the data” and closed and opened as new information suggested they could. Yellow school buses were re-wired with Wi-Fi to keep students digitally connected. Autonomous ones were even repurposed to keep people fed. Citizen inventors made it easier to find PPE and get vaccines. Frontline medical personnel and those that supported them innovated every day just to survive and then innovated to help millions of others. In many ways, science and ingenuity and entrepreneurship were marshaled to combat a society-threatening moment. The founders would be proud of that. Along the way though, there was also dithering and delusion. Tests were too few. Tracing at scale was too late. The digital divide languished. The summer of 2020 should have seen hundreds of efforts piloted to get more kids safely into school buildings in the fall. The fall of 2020 should have welcomed creative ideas for getting vaccines into arms in the winter. We should ask ourselves on that front why ideas like Vax-a-Million deployed only this May and what other opportunities we missed to promote vaccinations to skeptical populations earlier in the year. Moreover, all that we did to help, helped inequitably, delaying efforts to make this country’s promise — that everyone is created equal — a reality.