Reason Roundup

Biden's Plan To Fight Omicron With Mass Testing Is Laughable Given the FDA's Approval Failures

Plus: Criminals have stolen $100 billion in pandemic relief funds, and colleges are planning to go virtual once again.

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dpaphotosfive514750 | Ken Cedeno - Pool via CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom
(Ken Cedeno - Pool via CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom)

President Joe Biden urged Americans not to panic about the omicron COVID-19 variant during a speech on Tuesday, stressing that he had a plan to deal with the latest pandemic wave: mass testing. The federal government will purchase half a billion COVID-19 tests and distribute them throughout the country for free.

According to The Washington Post:

"This is not March of 2020," Biden said, referring to the early, pre-vaccine days of the pandemic as he spoke from the White House State Dining Room. "Two hundred million people are fully vaccinated. We're prepared. We know more."

The president still issued a grave warning to unvaccinated Americans who he said have a "patriotic duty" to get vaccinated, but he spent much of his speech reassuring Americans the country has the tools to avoid the extreme measures that typified the early months of the pandemic response.

To that end, Biden detailed new plans to expand coronavirus testing sites across the country, distribute a half-billion free at-home tests and deploy more federal health resources to aid strained hospitals as the omicron variant drives a fresh wave of infections.

There's just one problem with this plan: The tests won't arrive until January, by which point the omicron variant will have already ravaged the country, notes Reason's Ronald Bailey.

The White House could have gotten to work on this plan a little earlier—as recently as two weeks ago, press secretary Jen Psaki mocked the idea of having the government send free tests to all Americans. In many other countries, it's much easier to procure inexpensive COVID-19 tests, largely because those countries' regulatory apparatuses are not so slow-moving and bureaucratic.

Indeed, the real problem isn't that the White House has been too slow to mail tests to every American. The real problem is that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have stymied efforts to approve various cheap, rapid test options—a costly mistake that has led to thousands of preventable deaths.

A new report by ProPublica details federal regulators' infuriating series of screw-ups. For instance, Irene Bosch, an MIT scientist, developed a reliable 15-minute test at the start of the pandemic that only cost $10—and would have cost even less if purchased in bulk. But the FDA refused to approve the test because it wasn't as accurate as the harder-to-come-by PCR tests.

Bosch's test didn't need to be the most accurate test: It just needed to be cheap and easy to mass produce. After all, people who tested positive could always get a PCR for additional verification. What's more, Bosch's test measured infectiousness itself:

David Paltiel, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, said a significant part of the problem is that the FDA created a detailed roadmap for tests that give patients a close-to-definitive answer on whether they have COVID-19, but never created a separate framework for rapid tests that serve a different purpose: helping people get frequent, fast evidence of whether they may be contagious.

"The former are tests of infection; the latter are tests of infectiousness," Paltiel said. "They both share the same regulatory pathway — a pathway that was designed with diagnostic testing in mind and is littered with requirements that make no sense for the purpose they serve."

He added, "It's an outrage that rapid tests aren't dirt cheap and plentiful on grocery store shelves."

Meanwhile, the CDC thought it could invent its own, superior test—but government scientists screwed up the process, putting the country weeks behind the curve. Testing could have been an important tool for slowing the spread of COVID-19, but the federal government literally decreed that it was illegal to flood the market with tests unless they cleared an improbably, unnecessarily high regulatory burden. From ProPublica:

As ProPublica recently detailed, many companies with at-home tests have been stymied by an FDA review process that has flummoxed experts and even caused one agency reviewer to quit in frustration.

While E25Bio's test didn't catch quite as many cases as those now on the market, it could have been used to catch superspreaders, with warnings that a negative result wouldn't rule out infection. Experts told us that the test could have been a vital public health tool had it been produced in the millions in 2020 just as COVID-19 was racing across the country undetected.

"Since we didn't have other options, it would have been a very good test," said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist who followed E25Bio's early progress. "If we were going to war, and somebody was invading us, and we had a bunch of revolver pistols, and we didn't yet have the shipment of machine guns, hell yeah, you're going to pick up the revolver pistol. You do what you can when you need to in an emergency."

The government picked up the revolver and promptly shot itself in the foot.

FREE MINDS

Campus after campus is announcing that the next semester will begin online. From Inside Higher Ed:

The Universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Chicago announced that they will start the spring semester online. Some students will be on campus, being tested, during some of this period.

At UIUC, this rule is to allow time to meet a COVID-19 testing requirement. The first week of class (Jan. 18 to 21) will be online. In-person instruction will resume Jan. 24.

The schedule at Chicago starts earlier, and so the first two weeks of classes (Jan. 10 to 23) will be online. Exceptions will be made for health science classes and other classes that must meet in person.

"This is not how we expected the spring semester to begin; however, if there is any consistency to COVID-19, it is its unpredictability," said a letter to the campus from Michael Amiridis, chancellor at Chicago, and other administrators.

Kean University will "transition to predominantly remote work and classes effective Thursday, December 23, 2021, through Sunday, January 30, 2022," the university announced. The spring term begins Jan. 18.

Gallaudet University announced that the first two weeks of spring semester classes will be online.

College campuses, where the predominantly young population is heavily vaccinated and at low risk of COVID-19, have nevertheless become enclaves of militant obedience to the strictest pandemic mandates. That will remain true for the omicron variant, even if it does indeed turn out that this strain is comparatively mild.

FREE MARKETS

Criminals have stolen $100 billion in COVID-19 relief funds, according to the Secret Service. CNBC reports:

The stolen funds were diverted by fraudsters from the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program and a another program set up to dole out unemployment assistance funds nationwide.

More than $2.3 billion in stolen funds have been recovered so far, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 suspects who span the spectrum from individuals to organized groups, according to the agency. The government has shelled out about $3.5 trillion in Covid relief money since early 2020, when the pandemic began. …

"I've been in law enforcement for over 29 years and worked some complex fraud investigations for 20 plus years, and I've never seen something at this scale," said Assistant Special Agent in Charge Roy Dotson, who was named to the new role at the agency.

Dotson, in an interview with CNBC, said the ease of obtaining the funds has made it easier for criminals.

"There's no doubt that the programs were easily accessible online. And so, with that, comes the opportunity for bad actors to get into that mix," he said. "It was necessary to try to get these funds out to people that were truly hurting, and no fault of anybody."

When the government hands out trillions of dollars, it goes without saying that waste, fraud, and abuse will follow. Of course, billions were also spent legitimately but questionably: media companies claimed their share of the spoils, and school districts collected the funds and spent them on all sorts of non-pandemic things.

QUICK HITS

  • Former President Donald Trump happily confirmed that he had received a booster shot and chided his vaccine-skeptical audience for playing into Democrats' hands:

  • The Department of Education has vowed to keep schools open, despite omicron fears.
  • Bill Gates says that he is canceling his holiday plans due to the spread of the omicron variant.
  • The pandemic has devastated U.S. population growth.
  • An alleged assault against a Muslim female student at the University of Maryland appears to have been a hoax.
  • The CEO of OnlyFans is stepping down.
  • That's a wrap for the 2021 Reason Roundup. We're happy to report that Elizabeth Nolan Brown—now a mom!—will be back beginning in the new year. In the meantime, stay happy, stay free, and, in conclusion, legalize heroin.