The FDA was disastrously slow in approving Covid tests and held them to a standard more appropriate to doctor’s offices than home testing

See The Invisible Graveyard is Invisible No More by Alex Tabarrok.

"We called it the invisible graveyard, the place they buried people killed by FDA delay. Back then only a few of us–mostly libertarians long practiced in seeing the invisible hand–could see the invisible graveyard. Normal people looked at us oddly and quickly ran away when we frantically pointed to the dead. “There! there! Can’t you see the bodies?” Now, however, the veil has been lifted and even normal people see.

Here is Ezra Klein writing in the NYTimes:

The problem here is the Food and Drug Administration. They have been disastrously slow in approving these tests and have held them to a standard more appropriate to doctor’s offices than home testing. “The F.D.A. needs to catch up to the science,” Mina said, frustration evident in his voice. “They are inadvertently killing people by not following the science.” On my podcast, I asked Vivek Murthy, President Biden’s nominee for surgeon general, whether the F.D.A. had been too cautious. “I do think we’ve been too conservative,” he told me. Murthy went on to argue that there’s a difference between the diagnostic testing doctors do and the surveillance testing the public could do and that the F.D.A. had failed to appreciate the difference. Speeding the F.D.A. on this issue will be an early, and crucial, test for the Biden administration. In this case, Democrats need to deregulate.

Even back in December when I was tweeting from the rooftops things like:

Your daily reminder that 14,696 people have died from COVID in the United States since Pfizer applied for an EUA from the FDA.

people argued that I was exaggerating the simple math of FDA delay. Today, however, the reality of deadly delay is almost conventional wisdom. Here’s Klein again:

The new strains spread quickly. The speed of our countermeasures will decide our fate. What feel like reasonable delays in our normal experience of time — a few weeks here for Congress to debate a bill, a few weeks there for the F.D.A. to hold meetings — could lead to the kind of explosive infections that overwhelm our hospitals and fill our morgues."