In the same way covid caught everyone including politicians totally off guard, many many thousands died but ultimately governments worked together, public locked down and science come together to create a vaccine and see the virus out.
There is many institutions and governmental departments currently working on the threat of AI.
In the scheme of pandemics, Covid was one of the lesser deadly ones and people had time to react. AGI will wreck everything before they even realise there's a problem. And there are no major governments working on the threat of AI. AI safety is a purely academic field still that is vastly underfunded.
As mentioned, the problem here is that people don't even understand the threat so have no way to understand the dangers it presents.