I would actually argue that it should be the government's role to push the development of vaccines and drugs for treating even harmless diseases. We spend trillions of dollars on national defense in the US, when you look at the economic damage and cost in lives that the Covid-19 outbreak has cost us, the threat of disease outbreaks is every bit as damaging as a military attack, maybe even worse. If we had taken the time to develop and take all the way through the approval process a vaccine to previously encountered Coronaviruses such as SARS or MERS we would probably already have a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 approved by the FDA and in distribution. Maybe we should be building a few less F-35s and instead be developing vaccines against otherwise harmless viruses, because you never know when a close relative of a harmless virus is going to turn into a deadly outbreak. In the US at least that seems like it should fall under the protective role of the federal government.
The economic damage is coming mainly from economical policies, namely lockdowns.
The death rate has been quite low overall, even including the initial phase in which our incompetence in curing covid caused more deaths than it should have.
I agree the government wastes money on a lot of things (13bln per day!) and that's exactly why I'd rather have the market come up with what we should be spending our money on.
