In our first chapters, we recounted the many ways that America has gotten in the way of building what we need to flourish in the twenty-first century, from homes to clean energy. But the pandemic was a different kind of challenge. Here was a problem we couldn’t regulate, or subsidize, or merely build our way out of. No number of masks for shoppers or plastic dividers in restaurants could do what the vaccines did. The end of the health emergency required the summoning into existence of something fully new. To defeat COVID, it wasn’t possible to build our way out of the problem. We had to invent
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