New Zealand was able to shut down and stay shut down because it could. Just think if the US took the NZ approach. Would there be less illness? Sure. But the world’s economy would be in shambles and would be so for decades. We (and a few other countries) are too important to the world economy to be able to shut down for an extended period. NZ is not. It’s nothing. Two politically opposed admins in the US came to this same conclusion, so you can’t just say it was right or left wing motivated.
I spend half the year in St. Barts. I was there for the start of the pandemic. We completely shut down. You had to have a “pass” to go out for your time period. We had something like 5 deaths the entire pandemic. Why? We shut down completely. We were able to because in the global economy, SBH is like NZ - a zit on the global scale.