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Don’t Blame Capitalism for the Lack of Covid Tests. Blame the FDA.
By now, just about everyone recognizes that the shortages and the high prices of rapid at-home antigen tests, which I wrote about yesterday, is a problem. But one common mistake that people are making is to blame those shortages, and especially those high prices, on “capitalism.” If it weren’t for greedy capitalists, the argument implicitly (and explicitly) goes, tests would be a lot cheaper. The reality, though, is exactly the opposite. The reason it’s so hard to find a rapid test right now, and the reason they’re so expensive, is because of too much regulation, not too much capitalism.
Rapid tests are not, as it turns out, difficult to make. Nor is there a dearth of companies ready and able to make them. The problem we’ve faced in the United States is that the Food and Drug Administration established excessively high standards for approving rapid tests, requiring manufacturers to jump through expensive and complicated hoops, and demanding that rapid tests be comparable in sensitivity to PCR tests, even though rapid tests and PCR tests serve very different functions. (Rapid tests are best used to tell you whether you’re infectious or not; a PCR test can tell you whether you have Covid even before, or after, you’re contagious.)
The result of this is that while a country like Germany has approved more than…
