Interestingly, covid seems to have taught me the opposite. When covid hit, the time-to-market of a new vaccine was 10-15 years. The collective action of governments divided this number literally by ten. Despite all the bad words we've heard about bad policies and mistakes done by governments, I think we should be proud of what humankind has achieved during covid (granted, some governments have done and still do very poorly but let's not enter this kind of discussion).
As a consequence, I am quite optimistic about what we could do if the effects of climate chang were as obvious as those of covid (which unfortunately is not the case). And in that respect, I believe in both government action and the intervention of brilliant minds/leaders. We'll need (and have) both.
The collective actions of governments did nothing there. What happened is we got exceedingly lucky the research was already there for 30-odd years and interested parties pumped money into it like there was no tomorrow.
Most governments since COVID started faffed about endlessly and took really poor measures all around for what it looked like eternity (with a few notable exceptions). Eventually they got around getting it half-right and here we are, massive death tolls that could have probably been avoided with earlier lockdowns, properly enforced mask wearing and so on.
At the same time a lot of countries where education has been and is poor are full with people who eschieve vaccination for the dumbest reasons possible and see in this manifestations of their freedoms (of spreading further a potentially deadly disease).
This pandemic brought the worst out of people and in a few situations the best.
No, human kind cannot rely on collective actions because human beings are way too selfish to do something for the greater good. And we can see it because we are in this point in time with climate change, the final hour - and still there are a LOT of people denying climate change just as there are people denying COVID is a problem.
I don't share your vision. Things are always obvious in the hindsight, but in reality, at least in Western Europe we did quite well. The challenges that governments faced were huge and numerous (if you account for social, economical, technical and political aspects).
Of course we can always do better, but the reality is that today, we have dozens of millions of people double-vaxxed here, and we're making progress.
Even looking within western EU, things could have been done so much better - remember how poorly Italy handled the start of the pandemic? But the true disaster is in Eastern and to a lesser degree central EU, as well as India, Pakistan, etc. Not to mention the trainwreck that was in the USA and to a lesser degree South America.
Try to look outside the box, the world is more than just western EU.
In particular Operation Warp Speed significantly accelerated the pace of vaccine mass production by removing the financial risk for pharmaceutical companies.
The efficacy of the vaccines is really being called into question though. Gibraltar and Iceland are getting more cases after being 99 and 75% respectively. Iceland is actually getting record cases.
The government did very little to protect the most vulnerable and chose actions that massively disrupted people's lives. Shutting down schools was probably the most egregious of the many mistakes.
One of the major things government did to get the covid vaccine out faster was... wait for it .... be LESS involved and not apply rules and regulations they normally do.
As a consequence, I am quite optimistic about what we could do if the effects of climate chang were as obvious as those of covid (which unfortunately is not the case). And in that respect, I believe in both government action and the intervention of brilliant minds/leaders. We'll need (and have) both.