Future presidents and candidates will need policies on winter flu and Covid and not on the model of the Biden administration, which has treated the virus as a problem in blame management. When authorizing boosters that U.S. voters wanted, it tried to blame Moderna for shortages in the developing world. Even so, today’s winter surge would be worse if individuals and whole states didn’t ignore the administration’s attempt to restrict boosters to over-65s. Mr. Biden, with the benefit of vaccines, has presided over more deaths now than Donald Trump, whom Candidate Biden practically labeled a murderer. He will be lucky not to see midterm ads reminding him of this. Unraveling here is a White House strategy that counted on Covid going away before the next election so it could claim its handwaving delivered us.

Which brings us to a final point: Analysts have puzzled over why similarly situated countries, even Nordic neighbors, varied so widely in their actions, including mandates and lockdowns. The answer begins to seem obvious. Countries, each with their own conflicted electorates, went their separate ways because there was no successful standard solution or “best practice” to converge on, because none has been found. Once this particular virus began spreading outward from a major city in China, it was perhaps fated to take up global residence in human and animal populations regardless of what we hoped to do about it.