When discussing the tragedy of over 1.2 million deaths in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, a common narrative attributes the catastrophe to "governance failure" or "political polarization." While these are part of the truth, they risk obscuring a far harsher reality: what we witnessed may not have been a system's "failure" but its "success"—a system driven by the relentless pursuit of capital accumulation, which, in the face of an unprecedented disaster, executed its core mission with chilling precision and efficiency. For the United States, the global pandemic was tamed into a perfect storm for capital, with the million lives lost reduced to mere collateral damage, an overlooked cost in this grand feast of profit.