It is now about as official as it can be: The United States has reached at least one million pandemic deaths after a COVID-19 response that began incompetently, that was dismissed by a significant chunk of the nation as unnecessary, and that would eventually morph into a new "culture war" that would turn every urged safety precaution into a battle between medical professionals who had spent decades preparing for new pandemic and Republicans who declared each one of those things to be tyranny.
When the Trump-led federal government was slow to respond, states took the lead to temporarily close public spaces and businesses in those parts of the United States in which hospitals were becoming overwhelmed. These closures were met with outrage, with conservative pundits and elected officials appearing on our television channels to offer up new plans in which older Americans, the most at risk from the virus, would agree to isolate or die so that "the economy" would be less impacted.
The closures were also met with armed militia groups, irate over the inability to schedule haircuts or get drunk in bars (but mostly the bars), assembling outside and inside statehouses to threaten elected officials who implemented such closures as means of protecting local hospital systems from total collapse.
When medical researchers determined that wearing a particular grade of protective mask eliminated nearly all viral spread, we had the first lead on reducing pandemic spread to levels that would allow most public closures to be lifted. But then a new response was launched, one in which everyone from House congressional leaders to Facebook conspiracy cranks insisted that wearing protective clothing was an affront to "freedom" and an attack on the "right" of Americans to infect each other if they damn well wanted to. Republican politicians would soon condemn mask requirements, and pass new laws barring pandemic-beleaguered schools and cities from requiring those safety measures.
In Florida and elsewhere, Republican elected officials so strongly believed that wearing masks during an ongoing pandemic was an affront that they appointed anti-mask public officials as health leaders, further ensuring pandemic safety measures would be sabotaged.
And then a miracle of science happened. A vaccine was discovered; several more vaccines followed in close succession. It was a testament to our new era of genetic exploration and discovery—a new ability to determine what was infecting us, and how, and what genetic twists might stop it. Even as new variants emerged the most successful vaccines have remained capable of cutting the chance of pandemic death by 90%; requiring workers to be vaccinated before returning to public-facing jobs would become the most effective means yet of stopping pandemic spread in its tracks ...
... and immediately, too, was opposed by Republicans looking to leverage vaccine fears into political gain. Every crank theory proposed by any internet nobody was heard from, and public officials nodded as long lines of cranks told them that the vaccine had turned them "magnetic," or that all the vaccines were merely vectors by which Bill Gates or other business leaders would be installing wi-fi capabilities into the general public, or that (in Florida, again) the vaccines were a non-Republican and offensively free means of evading a tremendously expensive Republican-approved treatment plan that the public ought to be considering instead.
Literally every single pandemic safety measure was attacked by a hoax-promoting political party. Every one.
The United States now boasts the largest known pandemic death toll of any nation run the world, but the one million mark is almost certainly lowballing the number of dead here by a substantial amount. Political resistance to acknowledging COVID-19 as deadly, often expressed with sniffling that perhaps many of the dead died "with" COVID-19, but not "from" COVID-19, means that the counted pandemic deaths are conspicuously low compared to the total number of "excess" deaths reported in the United States since the pandemic arrived here.
It will be even more difficult to estimate how many American lives could have been saved had the Republican Party not adopted pandemic misinformation, disinformation, and apathy as official party features. One most recent estimate, comparing the United States to the demographically similar Australia, suggests that 900,000 Americans would still be alive today had the United States adopted similar pandemic measures. Nine in ten.
Reaching the milestone of 100,000 dead in America was grim enough, and far in excess of what incompetent know-nothing buffoons insisted would even be possible. Reaching ten times that number is a crime beyond our ability to prosecute. It required willful effort. The number will grow even more, and it is now more likely than not that variants of COVID-19 really will become endemic, a new permanent fixture of America that will kill off more Americans each year than every other virus combined. That, too, is a product of political design. It was determined that momentary partisan politics was worth one million deaths because the alternatives, from masking to mandatory vaccines, were what the "elites" wanted America to do—thereby proving that we certainly shouldn't do it.
Instead, a new anti-vaccine movement rose on the American right that now threatens to eliminate mandatory school-age vaccinations for diseases that once filled cemeteries with child-sized headstones. That is the legacy the Republican right leaves us with, at the milestone of one million dead.
It didn't have to happen. It literally only happened because specific politicians and their strategists decided that giving a single damn about your fellow Americans was a new culture war that selfish, ignorant base members could be convinced to oppose. So here we are.