That changes the second it comes down to saving millions
Bruh millions of people died in the US alone from COVID and people were actively fighting measures to ease the bleeding on principle alone, and money was certainly not unlimited.
The people cheering on the rapture would absolutely prevent anything being done to redirect an extinction level asteroid if they thought they wouldn't be affected (and they will think that). And plenty more people would question why they should pay to save otger people's lives, just like they do with healthcare
The problem with Covid is the poorly educated not understanding adding how odds work. The odds change for a cataclysmic event.
You're also focusing on the negatives of the situation. We have come out of that pandemic with the technology to spin up a vaccine very quickly.
There will definitely be doomsayers but most countries are not run by doomers.
With Covid the companies that were positioned for solving that problem received billions. Industries will push their country's leaders to solve the problem because they want to profit off the solution.
This would trigger game theory. Countries that react will need to invest, countries that do not invest will find themselves at a technological. disadvantage. Destroying a space object is a step on the way to mining another object , first one to mine space ends up winning the scarcity race.
For covid, there wasn't just one or two vaccines there were dozens developed. We only had access to a handful of options but other countries had their own independent solutions.
Despite the loudness of the ignorant, Covid moved us forward in many ways. This situation would do the same to the space industry.
