Keeping my fingers crossed we don't experience another pandemic under the Trump/RFK "leadership". Gonna need a whole lot more portable morgues than the last time Trump incompetently bungled up the response.

Isn't that die already cast?

Not to say that the federal government doesn't matter - it obviously does - but a massive part of pandemic response requires action at the state level. In the earliest parts of the Covid pandemic, nearly all state governments were doing a lot. Even the red ones. Even most of the reddest ones had some stringent NPI measures in place, at least through about April/May 2020.

That changed, though, as divisions emerged over the main policy questions involved in the pandemic response:

1) What balance should we strike between illness/death prevention and the costs of that prevention?
2) Who should decide question #1?
3) What processes should be followed in deciding question #1?

The parties basically split over those questions. Oversimplifying and trying to take out some of the knee-jerk politics out of it, Democrats mostly decided that the answers were: 1) Maximally try to prevent illness; 2) scientists and doctors; and 3) regulations and emergency orders. Republicans decided that the answers were: 1) Less illness prevention and more minimizing other costs; 2) elected officials and legislators; and 3) legislation and other non-emergency democratic processes. And the big divergence in state-level policies reflected that.

I don't think we're going back on that. I think even if Harris had won, and appointed Anthony Fauci to be HHS secretary, the state-level response to a new pandemic would reflect the above split. I don't think we're ever getting back to that Spring 2020 level of nearly everyone being on board with the "we have to do everything to stop a pandemic" response. I think the federal government has lost most of its ability to materially influence state-level pandemic response, and it's hard to see how federal pandemic response can be effective with that being the case.