Liz Wheeler of One America News reports on “Tipping Point” that the federal government has sent out a lot of “mixed signals” about the efficacy and availability of face masks. There have been multiple reports from health care workers that face masks are in short supply at hospitals.
If this is true, why is there a shortage of this necessary piece of safety equipment for healthcare workers?
The New York Post tells the whole story of the problem in the title of its article: “Overregulation is making the coronavirus outbreak even more dangerous.”
Roger Klein reports for The Post, “It’s troubling that community spread in Washington state and other parts of the United States — possibly affecting hundreds to thousands of individuals — wasn’t detected sooner. Overregulation of diagnostic testing has played a major role in this delay.”
As of March 3rd, South Korea had over 500 testing sites and screened over 100,000 people. By pioneering in the use of “drive-through” testing facilities South Korea has been testing 10,000 people per day.
During that same period, the United States performed a minuscule 472 tests. Much of the problem says Klein is that the FDA is engorged with so much red tape that it will not allow highly skilled professionals at academic, public health, and commercial laboratories to initiate their own laboratory-developed tests (LDTs).
Klein, an expert with the Regulatory Transparency Project’s FDA and Health Working Group, says the FDA remained bogged down in time-consuming regulations while South Korea removed all hindrances it could for the process. The problem has been, in Klein’s words, a “self-inflicted crisis.”
Watch the video to learn what Liz Wheeler says our government should do rather than take over the production of face masks.
