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| It's Time to Track the FDA's Death Toll |
| 2020-04-03 |
| Mises Institute via Instapundit The Food and Drug Administration helped turn the coronavirus from a deadly peril into a national catastrophe. Long after foreign nations had been ravaged and many cases had been detected in America, the FDA continued blocking private testing. The FDA continued forcing the nation’s most innovative firms to submit to its command-and-control approach notwithstanding the pandemic. South Korean is in a far better situation dealing with coronavirus, because its government did not preemptively cripple private testing. One of the clearest lessons from the current pandemic is that nothing has changed at one of the nation’s most powerful regulatory agencies. The FDA is repeating the same mistakes and showing the same arrogance that I chronicled decades ago in articles for the Wall Street Journal, the American Spectator, and other publications. Dr. David Kessler, who became FDA commissioner in 1990, quickly sought to intimidate the companies that his agency regulates. A laudatory Washington Post article concluded, "What he cannot accomplish with ordinary regulation, Kessler hopes to accomplish with fear." Kenneth Feather of the FDA's drug advertising surveillance branch boasted: "We want to say to these companies that you don't know when or how we'll strike. We want to eliminate predictability." ...Dr. Kessler declared in 1992: "If members of our society were empowered to make their own decisions...then the whole rationale for the [FDA] would cease to exist." Kessler derided "freedom of choice" as an illusion unless people are presented only with government-approved choices. But the FDA "liberated" people by shielding them from information, devices, and drugs that could have saved their lives. Many Americans could die in the coming weeks and months thanks to the FDA’s blockade on coronavirus testing. Should we consider those victims as martyrs for the principle of bureaucratic supremacy? The FDA’s current commissioner, Stephen Hahn, conceded last week: "There are always opportunities to learn from situations like this one." Perhaps the clearest lesson is that it is time to track the death toll of FDA regulatory debacles. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 Maybe it is time to sack many in the FDA and reorganize it from top to bottom. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2020-04-03 10:47 |