n0 > That the most advanced and wealthiest country had to wait for a vaccine, is ludicrous.
I am blaming Amazon for the culture of asking for everything being solved in 1 day. you need to be realistic and have some savlanut. Open up ourworldindata and compare all covid stats between US and other developed countries. Not counting remote islands and continents, US did just below average on cases [same as Sweden and Israel, 30 to 100% over France, UK, Italy, Germany] and mortality (same as Italy, UK, France, Sweden, 2x over Germany, Israel, Canada) and 3rd best in vaccinations (after Israel and UK). Better comparisons would take into account age distributions and geography.
On vaccines, everyone was on edge for Phase 3 approval process (about half of serious vaccines passed it, so it was not a done deal), but in reality the bottleneck was in setting up production for all required parts. Here we have 2 mRNA vaccines setting up production on at least 2 continents, and J&J doing OK in Europe and B- in US. This is pretty successful. In vaccination speed, US was behind Israel but at exactly same rate as UK and 2x ahead of all other developed countries.