This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 9th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When the President of the United States got access to promising experimental treatments

following his revelation that he too had contracted COVID-19.

Well, it seemed at least a little unfair that more people can't access the same potentially life-saving treatments.

Cato's Jeff Singer discusses his upcoming paper detailing why the FDA's immense power

to make the rules for who can prescribe what, to whom, ought to be scrapped entirely.

When the president was at Walter Reed, it became pretty clear early on that he was going to have access to a lot of things that no other American would really have access to.

That included some experimental treatments not yet approved by the FDA.

And I guess it fell a little flat when the president came back to the White House and released this video and

said, hey, we have all this great health care, we have great drugs, great treatments, don't let this dominate your life and I thought well yeah everybody should be taking precautions but you have access to health care that no one else does.

That's true and a lot of that has to do with our FDA regulations so as we write about in our Michael Ken and I write about in our upcoming white paper called Drug Reformation since

1951 regardless of whether a drug works or not if you cannot get access to a safe drug without the FDA

deciding whether or not you need to get a permission slip from another licensed health care practitioner.

So there are certain exceptions now in in case of President Trump.

The FDA allowed him, even though it's not approved,

the FDA allowed him under a compassionate use exception

to get access to monoclodal antibody which is very

promising and might actually be very effective in fighting COVID because you don't

even have to pool plasma from convalescing people you could basically manufacture synthetic

antibody. But if another person wanted to get that, that's not going to prove even to be prescribed by the FDA yet. The FDA

stands in a way of our right to self-medicate and that's what we talk about and a great deal in our white paper.

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