I think that if we have to choose between letting hundreds of thousands of additional people die, or having a healthy economy, we utterly failed our priorities as a society long before the pandemic started.
US society has failed the "knowingly and intentionally" side of that, and also mostly the "trade" side of that (vaccines being the exception -- we actually did succeed at trading a pretty small amount of money for much-better-than-baseline outcomes there). But the problem wasn't that we chose to trade life for money, the problem was that we failed to have and act upon coherent priorities at all.