Is this the reason America has had such a disastrous pandemic?

If Francis Fukuyama was wrong about the end of history, he was right about one thing. Back in the scary days of March 2020 as the pandemic first hit the West, Fukuyama made one of the few predictions about Covid that turned out to be correct. It would be clear when the pandemic eventually subsided, he said, that ‘the crucial determinant in performance will not be the type of regime, but the state’s capacity, and above all, trust in government’. 

A study published this month in the Lancet backs up his theory. It suggests that countries whose citizens trust both their governments and each other have been the world’s big Covid winners. Why? For the simple reason that if you trust each other you protect each other, regardless of whether your government demands two metre social distancing, mask mandates or vaccines. 

So in Denmark, where trust is high (54 per cent of Danes says they trust their government), deaths have been low: there have been only around 600 deaths per million people during the pandemic. In