This is a Kato's special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. The FDA's delays in

approving tests for the coronavirus may have cost many lives to say nothing of

the rapidly increasing unemployment and

a now unavoidable economic downturn.

Cato's Michael Cannon discusses some of the policy changes he'd like to see to both stem

the tide of this pandemicemic changes to make our health care

system more responsive to rapidly changing needs. The government so far has not

taken the steps it needs to take in order to allow the sort of widespread testing for the novel coronavirus that we would need in order to

understand how this virus has spread so far and

Understand how best to combat it what containment measures are going to work and what containment measures are not going to work.

And that failure to take those steps has really made this problem much worse than it needed to be.

What happened was that for two months, the first two months of a pandemic,

the US Food and Drug Administration blocked from the market in the United States all but one

diagnostic test for this virus and the one that had allowed on the market was the one produced by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

And it turned out that the CDC's test was faulty.

They sent that test to lots of state labs and many of those

state labs could not make the test work. Those included state labs that were

trying to respond to the breakouts in New York and Washington State.

And so, really, whereas states that had very,

that were not hotspots, they had tests that they were not even using.

So the CDC, so the EFTA created these shortage situations

by having such a high barrier to entry into the US market for these tests, and then the

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