Everything you said is true but add a populist crackpot President, a huge alt-medicine quackery industry, and a significant fraction of the population that beli

Everything you said is true but add a populist crackpot President, a huge alt-medicine quackery industry, and a significant fraction of the population that believes absolutely asinine things about vaccines and medicine. The USA would have had a great response to COVID if it weren't for American anti-intellectualism. Not all totalitarian regimes have been handling COVID well. Russia hasn't done any better than most European countries and may have done worse if they're cooking their numbers (which is likely). Iran has done poorly. The thing that I think made China do well is a combination of an obedient authoritarian society and a large number of scientists and engineers in positions of authority. An authoritarian society is very good at problems of the form "have everyone do X," but that only works if X is the right thing.