This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 30th, 2021 on Cabot Brown.

Freeing trade in medical necessities has become more important during this pandemic.

Caters James Bacchus is author of the new paper,

Trade is good for your health.

We spoke earlier this month.

At its most basic level, how should we understand the relationship between health and the ability to

engage in trade? Being healthy is very often about being able to have access to medicines and other medical goods. Trade is critical to that, both domestically and internationally.

For many decades now, international... and internationally.

For many decades now, international trade

has been critical to medical health

in terms of increasing the availability of medicines and other medical goods and

speeding their spread worldwide in the pandemic with COVID-19 and now it's various variants we're seeing all the more

the inescapable connection between trade and health.

What did the U.S. government do to make goods, you know, critical goods needed to deal with this pandemic flow more freely.

Well up until a few months ago the United States government did

virtually nothing to make goods flow more freely during the pandemic.

The situation is improved somewhat

under the new administration. I think that's for two reasons. One, the

attitude of the new administration is different, but also I think practically speaking and now that a great many Americans have been vaccinated and

doses are available to those Americans who have not it becomes easier politically to be more

generous in supplying vaccines and other medical goods worldwide, we're still not, in my view,

doing nearly enough in working with other developed countries

...