I'm saying it was ALL mishandled, and on the heels of a circumstance that was NOT mishandled. I'm asking "why is that?"...
I'm opining that it was seized by media and the democrats, who are one and the same, and weaponized in effort to eliminate a political enemy. I'm saying that media and politicians stayed clear of H1N1 and allowed policies and procedures to deploy and operate without meddling for 'optics'... I'm saying that Fauci and Birch were exposed as charlatans to anyone paying attention and were rolled out and fought over by both sides as political pawns. I'm saying the lessons learned from H1N1 were completely lost when addressing COVID19. I'm calling it plainly- a political operation.
Spanish flue impacted 3% of the global population. The flu of 1968 has a harsh one. 2009/10 H1N1 impacted .03% of the population, and killed more than people realize. COVID19 is not something to trifle with, however, and especially in the beginning there was knee jerk reactions taking place... why? because it was man made and 'novel'- people were unequipped to combat it. Other than 'that' little bit of it (not little at all) it is no more threatening than H1N1- the infection rate is/was higher because of that.
The mortality rate of H1N1--while highly infectious--was
miniscule. They estimate there were 60M cases in the US, and only 12-13K deaths. It was significantly less fatal than the flu, which is why all the concern and media uproar died down so quickly.
COVID-19 was highly infectious and significantly higher mortality than the flu, which coupled with the fact that it was novel, meant that the impact would be orders of magnitude higher. We didn't have solid numbers (still don't), but much of the estimates are somewhere between 0.5% and 1% mortality, probably on the lower end of that range. That means it's ~5x higher mortality than seasonal flu, we didn't have a vaccine for it, and we had no natural immunity. That's a bad combination...
H1N1 never would have resulted in the lockdowns, because H1N1 was a completely different beast. As for difference in media attention? I'll readily admit that the media made this about Trump and his response; ever since he announced his candidacy, everything in the United States has been about Trump. But the entire media effort would have fizzled out in a month if this thing was anything like H1N1.
The initial rollouts came as the next steps in the process after the approvals. They're all connected. The first doses were administered in the USA by mid-December and at that point tens of millions of doses were already in the manufacturing process. If you're saying those had nothing to do with the sitting president at the time, well that's certainly a thing you could say. If you're saying tens of millions of doses were NOT in manufacturing WIP until January 20th, well that's something else.
The USA handled all of that pretty well. While Europe has faltered pretty badly. There's no realistic way to view it any differently than that.
Looking into it further, I can give Trump some credit on this. Apparently the big contracts where the gov't agreed in advance to buy millions of doses of the vaccines if they were successful appear to be an executive branch action.
Not to say another President or administration wouldn't have done the same, but I'll call a spade a spade on this one. Kudos to him and his administration for doing it.