A pretty nice general overview of the abject failure (and imho treasonous conduct) of this administration's response to covid, but here's probably the thing to investigate first and foremost:
But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.
Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
Right, so there was a House committee hearing today with Fauci & co., in which the panel of Trump's covid response team members was asked about delays in testing, and:
“We cannot test our way out of this or any other pandemic,” he said in his opening statement before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
Where does Trump find these sycophants willing to claim that we cannot do the thing almost every other developed Western country did (Ya blew it, Sweden)?
I think we've only scratched the surface of Russia's covid dis- and mis-information efforts, if we're so far only supplied small leaks from anonymous top-level officials. It makes you wonder how much of the mis-dis-whatever-information about covid from Republicans has been implanted by foreign powers.