Description
pandemic, including its overall wealth, leadership in absolute and per capita health care spending, and unrivalled scientific and epidemiological expertise. Yet, the United States’ record of management of the pandemic throughout the first 18 months was among the worst in the world. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to assert that the United States has been—and in important aspects remains—the epicenter of the pandemic. On October 1, 2021, 9 months after vaccines became widely available, deaths from Covid were only 40% below the country’s January 2021 peak. When figures are adjusted for population the U.S death rate is approximately 8 times higher than in the rest of the OECD countries put together.
The U.S. experience accords with studies that have shown that right wing populism led to a distinctive and counterproductive response to the pandemic. However, the problems and contradictions in the U.S. effort to contain the pandemic are not simply reducible to “culture wars” or ideology, but rather reflect a broader crisis of neoliberal capitalist regulation. This chapter employs a political economy approach in order to develop a holistic understanding of both the causes and consequences of the U.S. response to the pandemic: Efforts to contain the virus were constrained by the impact of decades of neoliberalism on the U.S. economy and health care system and the increasingly polarized ideological environment to which it gave rise. At the same time, the pandemic served to consolidate and deepen the neoliberal crisis. Fiscal and monetary policies designed ostensibly to cushion society from sickness and massive recession served to deepen inequality, impose a disproportionate share of the burden of adjustment on the poorest Americans, and thereby impede efforts to contain the virus.
