Opinion | How America Lost the War on Covid-19

And there’s surely something to this. I don’t think any other advanced country (but are we still an advanced country?) has a comparable number of people who respond with rage when asked to wear a mask in a supermarket. There definitely isn’t any other advanced country where demonstrators against public health measures would wave guns around and invade state capitols. And the Republican Party is more or less unique among major Western political parties in its hostility to science in general.
But what strikes me, when looking at America’s extraordinary pandemic failure, is how top-down it all was.

I know some people will take this the wrong way, but I really think there is a contingent of Americans who won’t weak masks exclusively “because you told me to do it”. As pointed out in the article, the fact that the guy at the top talks about it like it’s BS doesn’t help either.