Lawrence Wright exhaustively details the American response to the pandemic in the cover story for this week’s New Yorker. It is a long and infuriating read, masterfully reported and well worth your time to understand how the United States, which should have been uniquely prepared to manage the virus, instead failed in such an unprecedented and shameful way.

The debacles are too numerous to quote, here’s just one example, where the CDC and FDA failed to provide adequate testing and how disastrous that turned out for the U.S.:

Without the test kits, contact tracing was stymied; without contact tracing, there was no obstacle in the contagion’s path. America never once had enough reliable tests distributed across the nation, with results available within two days. By contrast, South Korea, thanks to universal public insurance and lessons learned from a 2015 outbreak of mers, provided free, rapid testing and invested heavily in contact tracing, which was instrumental in shutting down chains of infection. The country has recorded some fifty thousand cases of covid. The U.S. now reports more than four times that number per day.

The pandemic would have been challenging for the United States no matter who was governing — our lack of universal healthcare, how we’ve systematically defunded vital public research, and our national devotion individualism and market-based solutions over collective action show how particularly ill-prepared we are compared to every other developed nation on the planet. That we are the richest nation in the history of the world and allowed this tragedy to unfold is particularly damning. The most American of dichotomies may be it was our research that led to a vaccine but we were unable to contain the outbreak via public health guidance.

The government that faced this pandemic, though, was particularly disqualified to face such a dire threat. One of the few strokes of luck of the Trump administration prior to 2020 was the federal government faced few crises that were not of Trump’s own making — no terrorist attack, no economic collapse. The administration’s response, along with the feckless silence of congressional Republicans, to the California wildfires or Hurricane Maria showed how dismally unprepared they were to deal with the sorts of dangers every government must manage.

Republicans have been failing this test for decades now, the Trump-McConnell government disastrously so. The incompetence of human fiascos like Pence and Kushner coupled with the arrogant, uncaring pathological disdain of Trumpist apparatchiks like Mnuchin combined to debilitate the work of everyone from front line workers to long-serving civil servants. The greatest danger we face as a nation is that those responsible for this monstrous fuck-up aren’t held to account.

A lucid, fascinating, often funny, and enlightening piece about one of the vaccines by Bert Hubert. He not only details the vaccine itself, down to the specific sequences of RNA, but how mRNA vaccines in general work. It’s a wonderfully nerdy yet approachable read. Did you know there’s such a thing as a DNA printer¹?

Seeing this breakdown of the individual sequences, how bits get swapped in to make the vaccine undetectable or more effective at producing the spike protein in isolation, is just fascinating. The science of DNA and genome sequencing have been reality for most of my life — I can still remember what a big deal The Human Genome Project was, both when it was announced and completed — but they’ve always felt very abstract or the realm of science fiction. Seeing the diagrams with nucleotides feels like Jurassic Park, this is about as real as it gets, though.

It’s also fascinating how many of the citations and links are to what are essentially open source biology. Obviously, Covid is a unique challenge in human history and it is an indisputably amazing thing that so many scientists are working together so diligently to understand and defeat it. It’s also pretty amazing that anyone can just go to the WHO website and download the genetic sequence for the vaccine.

Eater looks into how King Arthur dealt with everyone baking through the pandemic.

The thing is, the great flour shortage wasn’t a flour shortage at all. Our national grain stockpile wasn’t depleted, and flour still flowed in train cars and trucks and pallets. For King Arthur, the impact in the early months was small. The virus hadn’t yet reached the mills it works with, clustered in breadbasket states; Heald says none of their mill partners had staff out sick with COVID-19 or waiting on test results until much later. In the spring and summer, everyday people couldn’t buy flour because of tight bottlenecks in a national logistics system built around the logic of consumerism. The problem wasn’t the flour. The problem was getting it into bags.

The solution King Arthur used: promise every mill they work with that they’d buy whatever they could produce. Even then, they quickly ran into the problem of how to source enough bags! All told, King Arthur sold a lot of flour this year.

In related, feel-good baking news is this wonderful profile of Sarah House, the in-house baker extraordinaire and recipe writer for Bob’s Red Mill.

Apparently, the computerized system they devised to determine who should get vaccinated first left out many of the people who are interacting with patients — and prioritized administrators who work from home. This could have happened anywhere, and almost certainly will again, but the fact that it’s at the university most associated with the rise of algorithmic-driven inequality is, as they say, not a good look.

Lenny Bernstein, Lateshia Beachum and Hannah Knowles writing at The Washington Post:

The “residents” — medical school graduates who staff the hospital for several years as they learn specialties such as emergency medicine, internal medicine and family medicine — were furious when it became clear that just seven of the more than 1,300 at the medical center were in the first round for vaccinations. Also affected were “fellows,” who work in the hospital as they train further in sub-specialties, nurses and other staff.

Residents across specialties had just been asked to volunteer for extra intensive care unit work in preparation for a surge in covid-19 patients.

An email to pediatrics residents and fellows obtained by The Washington Post said that “the Stanford vaccine algorithm failed to prioritize house staff,” as the early year doctors are known collectively.

This story really does have it all, when it comes to the abysmal state of American healthcare. First there’s the “failed algorithm” that was developed without consideration of the frontline workers in need of the vaccine most. These frontline workers, including resident physicians, aren’t considered full-time employees, so they fall into this gray zone of labor protection, despite being asked to volunteer to deal with hospitals being overwhelmed due to the ongoing failed government response.

The vaccine has only started becoming available and we’re already seeing how our failed healthcare system is completely unprepared. It’s going to get worse — the superrich are already figuring out how to game the system. This story has made headlines, eventually it will simply become normalized.

As predicted earlier this year, there is once again a global resurgence in infections from the virus. Once again the United States has failed to respond.

David Leonhardt, in The New York Times:

The U.S. was not alone in suffering a resurgence this fall. Much of the world did. But many other countries responded to that surge with targeted new restrictions and, in a few cases, with an increase in rapid-result testing.

Those measures seem to be working. Worldwide, the number of new cases has fallen over the past week.

In some countries, the declines are large: more than 50 percent over the past month in Belgium, France, Italy, Kenya and Saudi Arabia; more than 40 percent in Argentina and Morocco; more than 30 percent in India and Norway.

And in the U.S.? The number of new cases has risen 51 percent over the past month.

The causes are not a mystery. The U.S. still lacks a coherent testing strategy, and large parts of the country continue to defy basic health advice. One example is Mitchell, a small South Dakota city, where deaths have spiked recently — including the loss of a beloved high school coach. Yet anti-mask protesters continue to undermine the local response.

Simply looking at a map of cases per capita is damning. The same map as a function of GDP would be an order of magnitude worse — the wealthiest country on earth has failed by every measure.

The failure is obvious: our ostensible leaders simply failed to do what was necessary. Nearly every other nation on earth showed what was possible but the U.S. stood with dictators and other failed governments like Russia and Brazil.

The root of the failure is also obvious and it’s the Republican party. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since they’ve been telling us for decades their mission is to reduce the efficacy of government in favor of markets and individual freedom. When they are in power, their only goals are to dismantle government as much as possible, reduce taxes and regulations, and corrupt the political process so they maintain that power even as a minority. This story, also from yesterday’s Times, detailing how Republicans systematically dismantled the CDC, is a perfect example of the GOP’s approach. And in the middle of all of this abject failure, they barely lost a presidential election, maintained control of the Senate, expanded representation in the House, and kept control over the majority of state governments.

This pandemic will end at some point. The vaccine is here and we’ll slowly begin to sort out what our lives look like. The more intractable problem of how to deal with why we failed so badly will remain with us for much longer.

For the past twenty years or so, cities have been the victims of their own success. The pandemic has exposed how the excesses of capital have driven that. I’m not optimistic we’ll learn the lessons, even if all those glittery luxury condos stay empty.

Helen Branswell, writing for Stat:

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued an emergency authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, a seminal moment in the effort to curb a pandemic that has so far infected an estimated 16 million people and killed nearly 300,000 in the United States.

This historic decision, which came pretty quietly on a Friday night, means vaccinations will now begin in a few days. There’s still so much work to do, and months of difficulty and continuing to remain vigilant ahead, but what an incredible accomplishment.

There’s a lot to be angry about with this story. The vaccines are being developed by private companies, who have pre-sold hundreds of millions of doses to world governments. That fact alone is something of an indictment of how our market-driven world works today but it is, for all its advantages and flaws, how the world works.

The Trump administration pre-purchased 100 million doses this summer — that’s enough for 50 million Americans since the vaccine requires two doses to be fully effective. The administration passed on the opportunity to purchase more doses and is now scrambling to get more, which may prove impossible since Pfizer has already pre-sold doses to other countries. The pan in pandemic means global, after all.

It’s the exact kind of colossal fuckup Trump has made a hallmark of his presidency — a complete self-own borne of his own rank stupidity, complete incuriosity, and total incompetence. He’s signing an executive order with basically no legal standing that will attempt to force Pfizer to sell the doses they’ve already pre-sold to other countries to the American government, in an attempt to cover up for his abject failure. It’s the kind of proto-fascism his base loves and will inject into their hate-filled veins instead of recognizing how much it’s literally killing them.

Moncef Slaoui, the top science advisor for Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed”, said he has no idea what the president is talking about regarding the “America first” directive.

I was just saying to my wife last night that she and I should almost certainly be last in line for the vaccine once it starts to become available. This tidy visualization from the New York Times confirms it for me — roughly 268 million Americans should be in front of me.

Drew Armstrong profiles the truly outstanding Covid Tracking Project in Bloomberg:

The project is a demonstration of citizen know-how and civic dedication at a time when the country feels like it’s being pulled apart. Yet it’s confounding that, almost a year into the pandemic, the Covid Tracking Project is doing what might be expected of the U.S. government. “It’s kind of mind-boggling that it’s fallen to a group of volunteers to do this,” says Kara Schechtman, one of the project’s early volunteers, who’s since become the paid co-lead for data quality.

This is an equally inspirational and maddening story — volunteers with organization and guidance from a team of journalists working for a 150-year-old magazine doing the grueling work in the middle of a pandemic that could and should be managed by a competent federal government.

Pair this one with Delia Cai’s interview with _The Atlantic_’s Ed Yong about the marathon of covering the pandemic for 8 months.