I wrote about how anti-Asian racism (among other Trump qualities) made Trump but also the US in general spend 70 days doing other things while Korea ramped up its testing- but it also exposes there's a different kind of capitalism at play in Korea-- https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-13/trump-asia-coronavirus-testing-south-korea

without having ANY of the largest medical diagnostic corporations--while the US has 10 of the top 20--multiple manufacturers in Korea started cranking out the tests--without thought to who gets all the profit? Which CEO will profit? What about monopoly, oligopoly, share price?

So the smaller Korean companies made various versions of test at ample numbers and also importantly THEY ALL WORKED. The US--when if finally started making tests, has crappy tests, some of them were contaminated, etc. Useless--

This is what you get when the system is broken. If Jared had a testing company, it would have been another Jared grift fiasco. Ha, if THERANOS was still around, I bet THEY would have gotten a huge government contract. Or some other fake biotech startup--

Korea isn't perfect but you can see they got their testing manucturing done while with all our tech + $ we might not have enough borosilicate glass to make vials for VACCINES ample enough for herd immunity. Our culture is so "America is the best" we don't or won't see how badly..

...we're screwing up when smaller, less resourced countries do things better. Or, maybe we're just so anti-Asian was can't possibly fathom when [insert anti Asian epithet here] do things better.

We do things like looking to one person, one company, one startup like Elon Musk who was so sure HE could have gotten those Thai kids out of the gave with his submersible mars rover or whatever when Thai people just got them out with care and grit and basic equipment...

We might be the richest country, but we're not #1, but we SAY we are, which is the heart of MAGA.

Just like in global math tests, Asians kids generally do the best (due to education) but the kids in the US think they did the best but were among the worst

p.s. my cousin (a nurse) also said the KOREAN version of N95 masks are so much more comfortable than American made ones ... but Korea makes it so you can't grab them and export or hoard them because...that would hurt everyone

and here, this piece by the excellent @gregggonsalves in @thenation is a perfect piece to give you a similar perspective from a different direction help you understand how PREVENTABLE so much of this was + what a bad situation we are in bec of our leaders https://www.thenation.com/article/society/reopening-coronavirus-needless-deaths/

I should say our leaders but also our populace who are allowing themselves to go for cheap hate and divisiveness instead of a shared purpose like other countries

#AAPIHeritageMonth #AAPIHM