I also found this analysis of COVID-19 testing by James Bovard at USA Today interesting:
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, President Donald Trump ludicrously proclaimed that “anybody that wants a test can get a test.†That was baloney then and, unfortunately, despite a barrage of political promises in the meantime, it is still malarkey today.
So, if two presidents have both, shall we say, underperformed, where does the real blame reside?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the Trump administration policymakers blocked the speedy development and deployment of private testing that could have provided Americans with far better awareness to the perils they faced. Instead, the CDC sent out poorly designed, contaminated tests to health departments that gave false readings. (Trump boasted those tests were “perfect.â€)
and
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the Trump administration policymakers blocked the speedy development and deployment of private testing that could have provided Americans with far better awareness to the perils they faced. Instead, the CDC sent out poorly designed, contaminated tests to health departments that gave false readings. (Trump boasted those tests were “perfect.â€)
and
Scott Lincicome, a Duke Law School lecturer, recently noted in Barron’s that the latest “fix†is “is actually the president’s sixth promise to subsidize and plan our way to testing abundance.†Germany permits sales of more than 60 rapid COVID-19 tests, “including several made in the United States for export only.†Germans can easily buy tests for a dollar while many Americans can’t find and purchase a test at any price.
The FDA has “never been enthusiastic about letting people test themselves,” ProPublica reports. “In the 1980s, the FDA banned home tests for HIV on the grounds that people who tested positive might do harm to themselves if they did not receive simultaneous counseling. In the 2010s, the agency cracked down on home genetic testing kits, concerned that people might make rash medical decisions as a result.”
David Kessler, who is Biden’s chief science officer for COVID-19 response, epitomized this mindset with his declaration in 1992 when he was FDA commissioner: “If members of our society were empowered to make their own decisions … then the whole rationale for the (FDA) would cease to exist.â€
Unfortunately, few Americans recognize the FDA fingerprints on the COVID-19 testing debacle. Federal health agencies have had more blunders than practically anyone expected during this pandemic. The least that Uncle Sam can do is get out of the way of private efforts to help Americans recognize the risks in their own lives.
in which you will hear more than a slight echo of points I have made here repeatedly. Don’t expect the political leadership to deliver things that the federal agencies tasked with public health will not provide on a timely basis.
We need major government and, especially, civil service reform.
I think that the failure of, first, President Trump and now President Biden to reorganize and reform the CDC and FDA is a fair complaint. However, blaming the failures of these agencies on them is only fair in a “buck stops here” sense.
Scott Gottlieb had a pretty insightful comment on Face the Nation a couple of weeks ago.
Bold is mine.
Brennan: “… Where does that blame actually lie?
Gottlieb: “Well, look, I think I think it lies in a lot of places, I think a lot of the confusion emanates from CDC and the mixed guidance that they’ve- they’ve issued. Look, the administration, I think, has done an admirable job with certain aspects of this response. They put a big emphasis on rolling out the vaccines. They’ve done a good job at that 85% of adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine. We have to think about the counterfactual: what if we didn’t have that much vaccination as a country? What situation would we be facing right now? I think the administration made some mistakes at a macro level. The first was buying into this prevailing narrative when they took office that a lot of the problems, if not all the problems at CDC and from the federal public health agencies owed to the Trump’s administration and their mishandling of those agencies. Now, notwithstanding what the Trump administration did, it didn’t do to try to reform those agencies and interfere in their operations. The reality is those agencies had deep flaws and it made it hard to reform the agencies once you bought into that- that macro narrative. The- the second challenge I think that they bought for themselves was federalizing this in ways that they didn’t have to, particularly with respect to the vaccine mandates. I think once the federal government, the Biden administration, stepped in and federalized aspects of this response, they owned it and created a perception that they alone could fix it.”
I cite him as an authority since he’s a former FDA commissioner, while a member of AEI, is widely respected in public health and wrote a well received book on the issues facing the CDC and the FDA with respect to the pandemic.
CDC director Walensky has recently come forward and says the CDC needs an overhaul.
Of course, there is a lot of political difficulties in all this. Walensky says this as she’s become the CDC director that in her first year saw more people die of COVID then the much maligned predecessor Redford.
Sort of hard to reform in the middle of a pandemic. I am ambivalent about federalizing the mandate. It certainly helped cement the opposition which is all politically based. OTOH I dont think we have as many vaccinated without it. I kind fo think if people had just got vaccinated we wouldn’t be worrying about this quite so much.
Steve
True. I think we should consider the possibility that we will always be in the middle of a pandemic from here forward. And is there ever a good time for reform?