“Richard and I used to talk about this all the time,” recalled Carter. “What if we do all these things and we close the schools and the result is that we have a very mild epidemic? And people look around and say, ‘Why did we do all this?’ ” They decided that their hides would be saved by the countries that had bungled their pandemic response. They’d be able to point to them and say, “Look! That’s what would have happened to us!” They never imagined that other countries would use the United States to demonstrate their own counterfactual. “We are the bad example for the rest of the world,” said
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