Once again, private business outperforms government
The government let us down during the pandemic. Thank goodness private businesses stepped up by providing the goods and services we’ve needed to make it through months of lockdowns and social distancing and by developing the vaccines that will end the pandemic sometime next year.
To be clear, many government employees, including police officers, EMTs, public health nurses and other front-line workers, have literally put their lives on the line in aiding people infected with the virus. But government policymakers have repeatedly failed us.
In early 2020, to control the spread of COVID-19, we needed widespread testing, coupled with contact tracing and quarantining infected people. Tests were unavailable during those crucial months because private firms had difficulty gaining regulatory approval from the federal Food and Drug Administration.
By default, the country was dependent on a test developed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the CDC test was too complex to easily manufacture and, critically, none of the tests the CDCproduced and shipped to state public health agencies during those early weeks was reliable because, as an investigative report by the Washington Post put it: “The CDCfacilities that assembled the [test] kits violated sound manufacturing practices, resulting in contamination.”
Government red tape continues to hobble efforts to increase testing. Inexpensive, paper-strip tests for home use — similar to the familiar home preg
nancy tests — could have been available months ago if not for the FDA’s decision to require elaborate assessment and certification. These tests are less accurate than the standard PCR tests, but as a professor of epidemiology at Harvard put it: “it detects 85 percent of people when they’re transmitting. And that’s a huge win over what we have right now.”
Even if more tests had been available at the beginning of the pandemic, positive test results need to be followed up with contact tracing. In a federal system, contact tracing is primarily a responsibility of state and local governments.
Alas, government contacting tracing efforts have been ineffectual. To take a striking example, a woman who arrived
by plane from Iran was the first person in New York City to test positive for the coronavirus. At a news conference, Gov. Andrew CuomoandMayor Bill de Blasio pledged to contact every passenger on that plane. According to an investigation by the NewYork Times, howmanywere actually contacted? Zero.
During the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, de Blasio directed contact tracers not to ask people testing positive whether they had participated in the protests. So much for putting science ahead of politics.
State and local governments have also failed to protect those most vulnerable to the virus: the elderly in nursing homes. Some local officials, notably Gov. Ron
DeSantis of Florida, took effective steps to protect nursing home residents, but most, including Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, did not.
As a result, 90,000 nursing home residents nationwide have died, including more than 6,000 in Pennsylvania.
Early in the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health officials told us that masks provided no protection and that we shouldn’t wear them. They later said they did so to preserve the supply of surgical and N95 masks for doctors and nurses. Perhaps that was a good reason for dissembling, but if they had been candid with us, how many people could have avoided infection by using improvised cloth masks?
This fall, many local school districts are either partly or entirely online, although the science is very clear that schools are not an important source of infection and that the educations of low-income and minority students are irreparably damaged when they are denied full-time, in-class learning. But school boards are apparently more concerned with not upsetting teachers unions than they are with educating students.
During the early months of the pandemic, the Wolf administration failed to compile accurate data on COVID cases and deaths, as my colleague Steve Thode demonstrated. And if Wolf favors science over politics, why has he relied for advice on a pediatrician rather than an epidemiologist or a specialist in respiratory diseases?
Compare the failures of government with the successes of private businesses. Companies met surging demand for goods, from canned soup to toilet paper, by quickly gearing up their supply chains to increase production. Amazon, Instacart and other firms expanded home delivery of groceries and other goods.
Hospitals, which are primarily private, nonprofit businesses, adapted to an unprecedented surge in patients. And, with the help of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, pharmaceutical firms developed at least two effective vaccines in less than eight months — a stunning achievement that many experts believed was impossible.
Let’s keep in mind what happened during the pandemic when considering the left’s calls to dismantle the market system and replace entrepreneurs with government bureaucrats.