It has been a salutary lesson to the world, even if the message clearly hasn't gotten through to its own people.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The United States' disastrous experience of COVID-19, with infections topping 22 million and some 374,000 dead, should never have occurred.
It should have been the opposite for what remains the world's biggest economy and most technologically advanced nation.
IN OTHER NEWS:
Certainly, Australia has benefited from being an island nation, able to close its borders with relative ease.
Central to the ongoing US failure on such a catastrophic scale has been the widespread hold on the populace of misinformation, stemming from the very top and disseminated by all manner of unhinged, conspiracy theory loonies on social media.
This means you must face disaster when your president says drinking household bleach could be an antidote and then, for his own perverse political and narcissistic reasons, proclaims COVID-19 will one day just disappear.
The US is, no doubt, a unique case and in many ways could not be compared with the likely Australian experience.
We are both Western democracies, but the US is a place divided on a Republican/Democratic fault line that's in another stratosphere to the far more diluted political loyalties of Australians.
Social media, specifically the twin echo chambers of Twitter and Facebook, have held such enormous sway because of the almost instantaneous spreading of all manner of theories with no basis in fact.
The issue now is that some of these fools, specifically the anti-vaxxer crazy brigade, will try to spread their untruths at what is such a critical time.
And that is that the COVID-19 vaccines about to be rolled-out across Australia pose a risk to public health.
No, such rubbish is the risk.
The vast majority of Australians will be happy to take the double jab of protection.
But even if only a few in number are swayed by this dangerous nonsense then that is a few too many.
The life-and-death stakes are too high to allow this to happen.