At the risk of being argumentative I would point out that many Americans died unnecessarily at the beginning of WWII as well. This is a common pattern in wars.
Not sure why everything is always compared to a war in any case? We have a war on this, a war on that. You can compare anything to a war, but that doesn't mean you're going to get useful insights out of the exercise.
I mean, yeah, I suppose it's Pearl Harbor is attacked and we twiddled our thumbs, but what insights useful right now in dealing with this virus does that comparison uncover? It's kind of just noise at this point. Save it for the post-mortem and the history books. It's not terribly useful right now. And it's certainly not useful to tell Americans at this point that it's necessary and common that many of them will need to die unnecessarily because, "that's always the way".
If we were serving in the White House right now I'd agree with you. But we're just people shooting the shit online, I don't really see what harm it does to discuss the things that are on our minds. Nothing we’re talking about here is really all that useful in terms of tackling the issue in front of us all.
The private sector was still supplying Nazi Germany while the US was officially neutral, though.
That some of those tests were contaminated, or that the FDA may have made a hard call in proceeding with redistribution or calling an audible to multi-sourced testing, is a strategic problem.
But let's not say nothing was done. I'm sure there were plenty of sleepless nights at the CDC, before we even had confirmed US cases.
(Happened to drive by it today. And it's easy to forget that there are people, just like us, who are trying to do their best there. We all make mistakes. And sometimes we don't, but our bosses do, and we get blamed for it anyway.)
That's kind of like saying "I've got a motherboard, am missing an Intel CPU, but AMD has CPUs, so I'll just put one of those in there."
Rolling out testing on the scale that was obviously needed even then is a non-trivial thing, requiring coordination of multiple parties, all in a climate of dubious information.
So, yeah, I think it's understandable (a) to stick to a prearranged plan (to avoid the risk of debilitating testing chaos), (b) to desire a domestic supply of tests, & (c) to avoid drawing on a global resource when there was expected to be no need.
As Dr. Fauci says, hindsight is 20/20.
What do you think the CDC does in the years there aren't pandemics?
I see more recent docs from HHS.
So, what has the CDC been doing the last 15 years?
The ban did not apply to US citizens.