Only tangentially related, but during the height of the Covid crisis I remember Taiwan's response was particularly efficient. The vice president of Taiwan from 2016-2020 was Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) - a man with a DOCTORATE in epidemiology.

The last time the United States had a presidential figure with any kind of STEM background was probably Jimmy Carter (bachelors of science and served as a navy nuclear engineer) - nearly 50 years ago.

>Only tangentially related, but during the height of the Covid crisis I remember Taiwan's response was particularly efficient

I think it's pretty related on the cultural side. If you look at how Taiwan succeeded, it's basically two fold. On the population's side it was willingness to follow orders, wear masks, get tracked using a smartphone app if you were sick and they were pretty damn strict about this. In particular mask wearing is a common courtesy in much of East Asia long before covid.

On the tech/politics side they were lucky to have people like Audrey Tang. But let's put it that way the chances that the US put a trans hacker who writes Perl implementations in Haskell for fun in a top cabinet position and for Americans to accept East Asian levels of collective discipline is well, not looking to good to put it mildly