This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, June 22, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The consequences of the errors of the CDC and FDA have been substantial as COVID-19 spread throughout the United States,

but the tasks that we give these agencies may have given the public a magical view of safety.

That is, safety is not a yes or no question. It implicates how much

you're willing to pay for an answer to an important question and how much you value some risks against others. Peter Van Doren is editor of Regulation magazine.

He suggests maybe it's time to unbundle some of the tasks given to agencies that,

among other things, are asked to manage the dissemination of knowledge.

What I wanted to talk about today is the generic problem in scientific issues which is we have the problem of how to acquire and think about knowledge.

We have to think about how to pay for knowledge and then we have to think about how we use

knowledge to make decisions and whether we have to think about how we use knowledge to make decisions and whether we have to do that collectively or not.

And this incredibly weird FDA apparatus that we have is the result of choices about these three things that don't have to be bundled together, but they are.

Rather than pay for knowledge directly through public sector funding or non-profit groups

raising money for research or anything like that, the way we fund knowledge is by tying access to devices and to drugs through

you need permission from an agency to use a device and then the agency uses that

inability of anybody to access the device as a way to pay for knowledge by requiring the sellers of

devices and the sellers of drugs to pay for knowledge ahead of time before they

get permission to sell. We don't have to do things that way,

but that's what we do. And tied to that is also the issue of the public doesn't think of safety as a probabilistic

continuous issue. It thinks of it is yes or no.

And that yes or no view of safety,

which comes from a legalistic FDA approach to things,

...