Our governments didn't do nearly as much as they could have and should have to build a true infrastructure of care and solidarity during the pandemic—not compared with what we know is possible from the New Deal and the World War II mobilizations of the home front. Still, the period when many governments paid people to stay home, and offered Covid testing and vaccination for free, represented an extreme and historic deviation from every major public policy trend of the last half century, which has been a headlong flight from the very notion that we owe one another anything by right of our shared humanity. They had no choice: without these measures, millions more would have died needlessly and entire economies would have crashed.

SEED: Possible article angle: framing pandemic-era programs as an inadvertent experiment proving that universal care policies are administratively possible — and asking why they were abandoned after.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 766