 The death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic in the US is well over the 1 million mark now. It stands at around 1,031,000 deaths as of May 31st. The US, which is the richest country in the world, has the highest official death toll from COVID anywhere globally. The country has 4.2% of the world's population and over 16% of the world's COVID petalities. From lack of political will to misplaced priorities, different US administrations have failed at various levels to identify the urgency of the COVID crisis and respond adequately. Even as the death toll crossed 1 million, the priority of President Joe Biden and the US Congress remains spending on war and the weapons industry over critically needed COVID relief funds. On May 21st, Biden signed legislation to send $40 billion in military and economic support to Ukraine. A $10 billion package for COVID relief was originally supposed to be a part of the spending bill. But this was dropped because lawmakers could not agree on it and the expenditure on fueling the war in Ukraine was considered too urgent to delay. So the US death toll has passed a million and it's related to both how the US is prioritizing military funding right now in the current moment of still having high levels of case spread and also related to a lot of long-standing budget prioritization and misprioritization. And so from the start of the pandemic, we've seen a lot of things that have been preventable and it's worth really thinking back on the history of how we got here. And the US spends trillions of dollars each decade on the military and so there's a real we can attitude on US military spending. And in the pandemic, the response since it started has been, well, we can't do too much. It's not practical. It's infeasible. And that has been a real priority issue that has been noted. When people think about how many of these deaths, this million official deaths or more probably when you include excess deaths that are estimated, you know, in my opinion, it's overwhelmingly each one of those deaths has been preventable. The deadliness of the crisis was helped in no small part by the lack of resources available to the country's healthcare system. The public healthcare system in the US fell apart in the face of the pandemic. Thousands died as they were unable to seek care for COVID. Thousands more died from other illnesses as hospitals and clinics had no capacity left because of the overwhelming number of COVID cases. We've also had US led public health austerity globally so that pandemic response initially was not as adequate as it should have been. The US Cold War with China that is emerging is a point of, you know, failed cooperation of the two countries from the start. And so you have an immense amount of virus arriving at the US when we knew about it months ahead of other countries. And we were caught with inaction because we also had a public health and medical system that has had austerity and massive inequity in terms of access. And so we had no testing, we had no contact tracing, we have total disinvestment from community health systems. And so we have rampant uncontrolled spread and then too little too late action and shifting responsibilities to other levels of government and individuals to businesses. So there's a whole do nothing attitude around the pandemic relative to US military spending. And we're still doing that. Our recent spending on, you know, the US military and a military aid to Ukraine has a real imagination and boldness to it. And, you know, that kind of attitude hasn't been part of our pandemic response or pandemic prevention approach. The COVID crisis was only exacerbated by the pre-existing inequalities in the country. Disparities in healthcare access, stark inequalities in wealth distribution, housing insecurity have all been major factors in determining who has been impacted the worst by the pandemic. The US is a country with massive amounts of class and race segregation. And that happens geographically by community by household. It happens by income and wealth. And those things in a pandemic are extreme drivers for inequitable outcomes. And so what you have is some people who have jobs that allow them to work virtually or where they get paid and they don't even have to come in when the pandemic first wave was hitting. And other people who were given this, you know, title that might feel good of essential worker, but really they weren't given protections. They were actually withheld from protections for even until now, like the OSHA, the authority that has worker standards for safety, actually has not been protecting workers even until this day. And so workers who were deemed essential, but were actually, you know, left to uncontrolled to spread, faced, you know, work settings where the amount of virus was very, very high. We've seen this in knee-packing plants, healthcare settings in schools. They weren't given the protections that they needed. And then they go home, they go to their household, they go to communities where there's intergenerational living where people, other people have to go to work and hit a lot more community exposure at the household level and community level than richer, wider communities. And it's really unjust exposure to the amount of virus. And then once people get sick, you know, these are, you know, this is happening in a country where healthcare is very much determined by your insurance status, which is determined by your job status and your documentation status, whether you're an immigrant with formal status or not. And what that means is many people who might have even good insurance, but have been scared by insurance companies giving them extremely awful bills, surprise bills that scare them away from healthcare. They pursue healthcare too little, too late, because they're scared of the financial repercussions for their family. And other people, you know, they have great insurance where they have lots of money and they would rush to get medical care as soon as they think they might need it. And those separations in our society are stark and we see them every day, but especially in the pandemic, it's been life or death for many, many people.