A front-page article in Wednesday’s print edition of the Wall Street Journal is titled “Three Lost Weeks Stalled Virus Testing.” (The title in the linked e-version is slightly different.) The reporters are Stephanie Armour, Brianna Abbott, Thomas M. Burton, and Betsy McKay. The investigative report is quite good.
It talks about a number of mistakes made up front by the CDC. But here’s a whopper about the FDA:
Complicating matters for commercial and hospital labs, a public-health emergency Mr. Azar declared Jan. 31 created a new regulatory hurdle: They would soon have to seek emergency-use authorization from the FDA, a potentially time-consuming process, before their tests could be used. In a nonemergency, hospital and academic labs are typically allowed to design and implement their own in-house tests without much regulatory oversight. The FDA spokeswoman said that, in many cases, the FDA can do this review in as little as a day.
Get that? If there’s not an emergency, commercial and hospital labs are allowed to use their own tests. But if there is an emergency, these labs must seek and get FDA authorization.
I do not think that word “emergency” means what the FDA thinks it means.
READER COMMENTS
Art Carden
Aug 21 2020 at 9:39am
I revise upward my estimate of the probability that government failure is a much larger problem than market failure.
Jon Murphy
Aug 21 2020 at 9:55am
The sad thing is the FDA is merely one such case of gross dysfunction. From Day 1, the world governments’ response to this pandemic has been incompetent. Even ignoring the issues regarding the Imperial College model (which was used to justify most policies), the very agencies formed for the collection, organization, and analysis of pandemic data have dropped the ball. None of the numbers you see flung around about case counts, tests, deaths, etc., are remotely accurate. Those collecting and organizing the data are making mistakes a freshman stats student wouldn’t make.
There’s been no randomized tests to try to figure out the n, no consistent means of recording data, lumping in two different numbers into a single aggregate (like adding apples to oranges and calling them both peaches), no tracking of when cases/deaths actually occurred (only when the info was reported).
We have no data about this pandemic. None!
The FDA’s dysfunction is bad, don’t get me wrong. But it is merely the tip of the tentacle. And that tentacle goes all the way ’round the world.
Tom DeMeo
Aug 21 2020 at 10:13am
I agree with your characterizations, but if you think about why this happens, it is largely because that’s the government we choose. We have no consistent means of recording data, and no consistent reporting because governments are not organized or empowered to provide it. We actively fight such things at every turn.
So each of us needs consider our personal views on the nature of government, and then ask, do my views allow for competence of such government functions? Am I helping to cause this?
Jon Murphy
Aug 21 2020 at 10:22am
That explanation doesn’t work. This is a world-wide problem. It occurred in socialist countries, in democratic countries, in trans-national organizations like the WHO.
Besides, it’s not clear to me why “we” would have any effect on some of these mistakes. “We” did not tell the CDC, ECDC, and WHO to combine antibody and symptom tests into one “current cases” number. “We” did not tell the CDC, ECDC, and WHO to report deaths on the day they are reported to the agency and not the day they actually occurred. This is not about government functionality. It’s about competence.
The information is being collected. It’s the back-room organization and treatment that is completely incompetent.
In other words, why is it the same organization that can collect and organize properly Census data cannot do exactly the same with pandemic data? Why is it the largest employers of statisticians cannot conduct techniques they teach in Stats 101?
Aleksander
Aug 22 2020 at 9:33am
There have been several randomised anti-body surveys, like in Spain and New York. But I agree that high-quality trials have been surprisingly few, and got started hopelessly late.
Sam Grove
Aug 22 2020 at 12:47pm
I suggest that malfunctions that have been pointed out in corporate bureaucracy, such as the Peter Principle, apply even more so to government bureaucracy.
Noting that bureaucracies are not constrained by loss, there is no reason to impede the advancement of incompetence up the hierarchy as long as actors are capable of faking competence (a common political instinct).
Then there is the committee problem, the more people that are involved in making a decision, the harder it is to arrive at a conclusion, let alone a sensible on. Let’s also include the CYA factor where results are less important than looking blameless.
Markets constrain business from excessive incompetence, there is no such constraint in political government.
Dallas Weaver Ph.D.
Aug 22 2020 at 2:24pm
For many of the tests like the ones approved in Europe, the delay was about 30 data at a time when the doubling time for cases was 3 days. Only a government fiefdom with their delays can increase a problem by a factor of 1000 resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands instead of hundreds.
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