Covid testing failure and the state of American democracy
A little-noticed part of Biden’s covid address last night covered testing. He promised to use the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of rapid tests, to make at-home tests available through retailers at cost, and to increase the availability of free pharmacy-based tests. (A few details here.)
Making testing faster, cheaper, and easily accessible seems like such an obvious thing to do. In fact, it was an obvious thing to do months ago. If the authority and funding have been available to do this, why on earth wait? Yet instead of acting to get ahead of the curve, the administration appears to have stood on the sidelines and allowed manufacturing capacity to shut down. And why didn’t Congress specifically demand the use of advanced market commitments for all kinds of covid tests in one of its many covid bills? Perhaps there is more here than meets the eye, but on the surface it seems like an almost incomprehensible policy failure – one that Biden and Congressional Democrats had every incentive to avoid.
A natural response to this kind of government failure – and there are many other examples just related to covid – is to throw up our hands and endorse a very limited role for government. In my view this is a mistake. We need a government that has the capacity to address common challenges with a reasonable level of strategic foresight and competence. How we get there is a complicated question, but the journey needs to start with a recognition that, yes Virginia, we have a serious problem here, and that it won’t solve itself. Democrats and progressives who want the government to play a more constructive role in American life will need to think hard about what has gone wrong and how to fix it.
Biden’s New Vaccine Push Is a Fight for the US Economy
“…Democrats and progressives who want the government to play a more constructive role in American life will need to think hard about what has gone wrong and how to fix it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgnwjwN97cI
Robert Goulet – Impossible Dream
Biden’s new vaccine requirements draw praise, skepticism and outrage
To the extent that there is compliance, I wonder if testing is going to extend to the vaccinated pretty quickly? The NFL has a lot of experience testing and recently decided to double the amount of vaccinated player/staff testing from every other week to weekly. Seems to me that it won’t take much more than a week for employees to figure out that if the unvaccinated passed their weekly test, well the questions are going to be about those not tested. Also, is weekly a close enough interval to make sense? Is it possible to go from a negative test on Monday morning to being contagious by Friday? Also, there are a lot of places where hours will have people working Monday to Sunday possibly. We’ll see what happens to these programs, but I wonder if the liability for employers may turn out to be worse for untested vaccinated….’you tested some employees, but not others and there was a great deal of publicly available information that the untested group could be infected and contagious’. Depending on the costs, maybe just a weekly test for everyone…don’t ask, don’t tell and take the test, please.
Kramer
I wouldn’t pin a lot of hope on “think hard”. too many variables, too many players, too many agendas, too many “thinks.”
We may be looking at the ordinary “law of mass action” forces of history ( a way to say a whole bunch of cause-and-effect reactions and counter-reactions (newtonian not Hegelian) colliding with each other, sorting itself out through time without caring too much for thought, morality, logic, or casualties. but but by all means, if you have thoughts share them. From small seeds…”