Tag: hit&run

Impossible Foods: Capitalism Is the Most Powerful Lever To Fight Climate Change

“We don’t have time to wait for an international consensus on something as disastrous as climate change. We need to employ every single lever at our disposal. And frankly, that includes one of the most powerful levels we have, which is capitalism and consumer choice,” says Rachel Konrad, the chief communications officer of Impossible Foods. Reason’s Justin Monticello sat down with Konrad at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January of 2020.

Impossible Foods creates plant-based alternatives to meat. Its first product, the Impossible Burger, closely approximates the look, texture, and taste of traditional ground beef by using some of the same molecules found in animal meat but extracting them from plants instead. It debuted in July of 2016 and is now sold in roughly 17,000 restaurants worldwide. Konrad says that the company was founded with the explicit mission to save the world from “the disaster of climate change.”

You can buy Impossible products at Dunkin Donuts, White Castle, Burger King, Whole Foods, Qdoba, Red Robin, and other restaurants. For now, it’s significantly more expensive than traditional meat, but Konrad says that will change.

“The impossible burger uses about 80 percent less water, about 90 percent less energy, and about 95 percent less land” than most traditional beef production, she says. “Over the long term that pushes the cost for us, and ultimately for the consumer, down.”

Konrad says Impossible Foods creates new products based on their potential environmental and public health impacts. The company’s first priority was beef, but in January it announced the launch of Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage.

Impossible Pork, Sausage, and Burger cook and taste very similarly to real meat. The company’s key innovation here is heme, the same protein that makes blood red, which allows its simulated meat to “bleed” and sear like a beef burger. Impossible Foods isolated the protein from soybeans and developed a genetic engineering process to manufacture it in bulk.

The meat industry has responded to this plant-based competition by pushing for labeling laws that clarify that Impossible Foods’ and similar companies’ products aren’t the real thing, on the grounds that consumers might be confused about what they’re actually buying.

Konrad isn’t buying that criticism: “That’s obviously complete bullshit. Consumers are absolutely certain of what they’re buying when they buy our product, which is why we’ve seen such stratospheric growth.”

Speaking fondly of economic growth in any capacity is exceedingly rare among climate activists, where markets are often seen a major contributor to climate change. Impossible Foods takes the opposite position there. While Konrad says she has some issues with capitalism, “the reality is that we don’t have time to shift the economic system in the entire world in order to fix it, in order to then fix climate change…we need to leverage every single thing that we can. And I don’t know if you’re going to find a more powerful lever right now than capitalism, consumer demand, and consumers’ rational behavior.”

Produced by Justin Monticello and John Osterhoudt.

Featured Image by Lex Villena

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Supreme Court Postpones Oral Arguments Over COVID-19, Some Justices Will Work From Home

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended business as usual in the federal judiciary. This week the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it was postponing all oral arguments scheduled for late March and early April. That segment of the Court’s docket includes some potentially blockbuster cases. Most notably, oral arguments had been scheduled for March 31 in Trump v. Mazars, the constitutional showdown over whether the House of Representatives may subpoena President Donald Trump’s financial records. According to the Court, it “will examine the options for rescheduling those cases in due course in light of the developing circumstances.”

Meanwhile, the justices are joining millions of other Americans in adjusting to the strange new realities of social distancing and working from home. The justices are still planning to hold their private conference on March 20, where they will discuss the outcomes of argued cases and decide whether to grant new petitions for review, though “some Justices may participate remotely by telephone,” according to the Court. Given the advanced age and health histories of several of the justices, teleconferencing seems like a very prudent idea.

CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic wonders if the COVID-19 crisis will prompt the “tech-averse” members of the Court to “open their operations in more modern ways.” As she notes, “the justices for years have refused to televise hearings, livestream the audio from sessions, or even provide recordings of oral arguments the same day they are held. The Supreme Court of Canada, meanwhile, has been webcasting its proceedings for more than a decade, some lower U.S. courts livestream audio of arguments, and many U.S. state courts allow live TV coverage.”

I don’t think we’ll see too many radical changes at SCOTUS just yet. The justices appear to be in a wait-and-see mode for the time being. And as the Court’s official statement points out, “postponement of argument sessions in light of public health concerns is not unprecedented. The Court postponed scheduled arguments for October 1918 in response to the Spanish flu epidemic.”

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‘The Fear, the Panic, Is a Bigger Problem Than the Virus,’ Says New York’s Governor

“The fear, the panic, is a bigger problem than the virus,” says New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is resisting calls for “shelter in place” orders as a way of curtailing the COVID-19 epidemic. Telling New Yorkers they must not leave their homes “scares people,” he told The New York Times yesterday, and he will not approve such edicts in New York City or elsewhere. “That is not going to happen,” he promised, contradicting warnings to that effect from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The “panic” Cuomo has in mind is actually a rational response to the threat of a disproportionate, economically ruinous government reaction to COVID-19. “Why the fear, why the panic?” he said. “Because you watch things like that all day….Somebody says something, and then it’s on the screen right away. ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be locked in my home. I better go to the store and buy stuff.'”

That reaction is not only understandable but perfectly reasonable when state and local governments across the country are ordering businesses to close and telling millions of people they must stay at home except for “essential” purposes, when the mayor of New York City is threatening a similar lockdown, when prominent legal scholars are urging a nationwide lockdown and a suspension of habeas corpus rights, and when doomsayers are suggesting that such measures need to be maintained for a year or more. Is it possible that the politicians are the ones who are panicking, while the people subject to their whims are simply trying to deal with the fallout as best they can?

As NYU law professor Richard Epstein points out in his recent interview with Nick Gillespie, these extreme measures are motivated by worst-case scenarios that do not take into account adaptive behavior or the natural attenuation of viral epidemics. John Ionannidis, an epidemiologist and biostatistician at Stanford University, notes that governments are imposing “draconian countermeasures” based on data that are “utterly unreliable.” Estimates of COVID-19’s case fatality rate (CFR), ranging from 1 percent to more than 3 percent, are “meaningless,” he says, because they are systematically biased by unrepresentative samples that include only people with symptoms severe enough to seek testing or medical attention.

Based on data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship—”the one situation where an entire, closed population was tested”—Ionannidis argues that “reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.” He notes that “a population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than [the CFR for] seasonal influenza.” He warns that “if that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational.”

In the face of all that uncertainty, public officials may imagine they are erring on the side of caution. But that is true only if you ignore the negative impact of aggressive interventions. Some economists say those restrictions could lead to a downturn as bad as or worse than the Great Recession of 2008–09, which cost the United States an estimated $22 trillion—and that is without assuming even more extreme measures such as a national “shelter in place” order. It is hard to see how a loss of that magnitude can be rationally justified, even if you accept the worst-case scenario sketched by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

COVID-19 itself may have serious economic consequences. But the virus is not shutting down workplaces, disrupting supply lines, driving people out of business, depriving people of the jobs they need to get by, and confining them to their homes. The government is doing that.

Today China, where the epidemic emerged three months ago, for the first time reported no new local infections. Does that development mean that the severe economic price China paid for its sweeping restrictions on movement was worth it, and that other countries should follow its example? Or does it mean that the epidemic can be expected to peter out in the United States after a few months, regardless of whether the government locks down the country?

While governments in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have not imposed restrictions as onerous as China’s, they nevertheless seem to have been successful at curtailing infections. In South Korea, which has a robust testing program strikingly different from the government-engineered fiasco in the United States, the number of new cases has been declining since early March.

While the benefits of aggressive COVID-19 control measures are speculative, the costs are certain. Americans are suffering right now, and will continue to suffer, because of the way politicians have decided to respond. It may be impossible for everyone to be “made whole,” as Bernie Sanders promised during this week’s Democratic presidential debate. But the government has a duty to try, since it is inflicting this pain in the name of protecting the general public. Whatever relief measures Congress approves should focus on compensating people for the damage caused by these policies.

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“Demand for Guns Crashes Pennsylvania State Police Background Check System”

Lehigh Valley Live (Rudy Miller) reports, citing this Pennsylvania State Police press release:

Technology challenges and a surge in requests resulted in PICS twice going offline on March 17, 2020. An isolated server issue was responsible for the morning outage from 8:00 to 11:30 a.m. The second outage happened between 5:00 and 8:40 p.m., due to a backlog of requests.

Despite the downtime, PICS completed 4,342 transactions on March 17, compared to 1,359 transactions on the corresponding Tuesday in March 2019. Transactions include background checks for purchases, transfers, evidence returns, and license to carry applications.

The Pennsylvania State Police is working with its vendor to increase processing power to avoid future backlogs and will adjust staffing as needed to meet demand. Rumors circulating on social media that PICS has been shutdown as part of the commonwealth’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic are false. PICS is, and will remain, operational.

We regret any inconvenience yesterday’s downtime caused to licensed firearm dealers and their customers.

Fortunately, as best I can tell, the coronavirus epidemic hasn’t so far led to an increase in crime (and might indeed lead to a decrease), or to a sharp increase in police response times. I very much hope that it won’t. But events such as this remind people about how fragile normal civilization can be, and lead some to reasonably conclude that the time to stock up—even for a low-probability outcome—is now rather than later, when shelves are bare, background check systems are down, or gun stores are closed as non-“essential” businesses.

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Can Our Shuttered Auto Plants Make Ventilators for Coronavirus Patients? And Will the Government Let Them?

Can GM and Ford convert their shuttering auto plants into ventilator factories—and can they do it in enough time to make a difference fighting the coronavirus? We may find out.

We have a shortage of beds and equipment in American hospitals, and those who have read the reporting of Reason‘s Eric Boehm over the years know one big reason why: Government regulations, heavily influenced by hospitals trying to stop competitors, restrict hospitals’ ability to add more capacity via “Certificate of Need” laws. Now the spread of the coronavirus threatens to outpace the number of hospital beds and ventilators that America has available.

On Wednesday, Ford, GM, and Fiat all announced together they were closing their auto plants until at least the end of March. Now GM CEO Mary Barra has reportedly told the White House that her company might be able to use its excess factory space to build more ventilators. Bloomberg reports that Barra is already in talks to figure out how this might be done.

My advice to Barra (not that she needs it): Don’t wait for the federal government to get its act together. The CEO of Ventec Life Systems, Chris Kiple, told NPR yesterday that his company intends to ramp up production of ventilators fivefold but it will take about 90 days. The interview makes it clear that the process of procuring parts and building ventilators is not a simple one. Waiting for a federal government that has been dithering and obstructive in its responses will simply add unnecessary steps and increase the amount of time it will take for GM to transition. Even now, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health at the Centers of Disease Control is saying it will take at least 45 to 90 days to approve a new production facility to manufacture more masks.

Assuming, that is, that GM’s help is actually needed. Don’t take this article as a screed yelling for GM to get to work making ventilators for America. But if the company is better positioned to work directly with hospitals, evaluate the demand, connect to supply chains, and draw in the appropriate talent, it should be free to do so.

Some coverage of these possible manufacturing shifts compares them to the military efforts in World War II to help build Jeeps and tanks. Let’s resist that comparison. The federal government is supposed to oversee war efforts and call the shots on what equipment is needed based on its own military strategies and goals. This, by contrast, is a civilian public health crisis that relies heavily on analysis and expertise from the private medical sector. In the United States, federal bureaucracies have been sluggish in testing and in evaluating needs, and thus have contributed to the spread of the coronavirus.

The feds may be able to contribute with money and other resources. But let’s not have GM (and other companies) sitting on their hands waiting for the White House to decide what to do. America has plenty of skilled leaders. They don’t need to wait for permission.

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Health Bureaucrats Botched the Response to Coronavirus. Trump Made It Even Worse.

The single most important failure of the U.S. response to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has been the slow rollout of testing. This was an abject failure of bureaucracy. But it was also a failure of presidential leadership. 

The countries that have had the most success in containing the outbreak, such as South Korea and Singapore, have done so through early, rapid, and widespread testing and contact tracing, followed by targeted quarantines. South Korea and the United States discovered initial cases of the coronavirus on the same day in January. Since then, some 290,000 people in South Korea have been tested and new daily cases have fallen from 909 to just 93. Despite a much larger population, the United States, tested just 60,000 people in the same period of time. 

South Korea saw the problem and took steps to stop it. The U.S. was flying blind. 

Much of the failure to make mass testing available lies with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As a Wall Street Journal report makes clear, the CDC, which managed the development of the initial test kits, botched the job in just about every possible way: The CDC not only produced a faulty test that had to be retracted but adopted narrow testing criteria that meant many people with symptoms simply couldn’t be tested. 

Perhaps most disastrously, as The Washington Post reports, federal health agencies initially declined to certify tests produced by private companies that were better suited for rapid mass testing anyway. This is despite the fact that experts, including the former head of the FDA, were publicly recommending that they do so as early as February 2. 

The CDC was following its usual protocols, developing initial diagnostic tests on its own in order to maintain quality control, as it usually does. But that’s exactly the problem. 

This was a catastrophe of top-down, slow-moving, centrally managed government bureaucracy, bound by outdated rules and practices, unable to swiftly adapt to an emergency. It will almost certainly cost American lives and livelihoods. The virus has likely already spread far and wide undetected. One reason restrictive social distancing measures have been adopted across the country is that public officials have little visibility into its scale and spread. 

But this was also a failure of political leadership, most notably from President Donald Trump. For weeks, Trump and senior White House officials actively downplayed the threat of the virus. 

As late as February 25, National Economic Council adviser Larry Kudlow was offering assurances that the coronavirus was “contained” and that it was “pretty close to airtight.” Trump treated the virus with similar breeziness, suggesting that the virus was “going to disappear” and that while it might get worse, “nobody really knows.”   

The stock market, needless to say, does not look very good today. 

As concern grew about the spread of the coronavirus, Trump continued to insist that all was well, telling Americans to remain calm. “Anyone who wants a test can get a test,” he falsely claimed early in March. (Two weeks later, it remains difficult to get tested in many parts of the country.) Trump emphasized that confirmed case counts in the U.S. were low—which was true, but only because testing was so limited. White House officials later had to clarify Trump’s statement. 

The problem here is obvious: Trump, who as the head of the executive branch oversees federal agencies such as the FDA, did not view the virus as a serious problem—and did not want others to view it that way either. That, in turn, translated into a downstream lack of urgency, which meant that critical aspects of the response were not prioritized.  According to The Wall Street Journal, health officials who have examined the testing calamity have concluded that it was a result of both bureaucratic bumbling and a “broader failure of imagination,” in which Trump and other administration officials “appeared unable or unwilling to envision a crisis of the scale that has now emerged.”

The job of a president is to make decisions, set priorities, and convey clear information to both the public and the staff of the executive branch. This is especially important in a moment of crisis, when the executive is in charge of acting both quickly and with sound judgment. In this outbreak, Trump has failed on every count. Not only did he fail to see the threat even when it was apparent to experts, but he actively undermined preparedness by downplaying its significance far long after the problem was apparent, and by providing false and misleading information as the mitigation effort proceeded. 

Trump has also repeatedly mischaracterized his own administration’s responses to the crisis, saying, for example, that his 30-day ban on European travel would include cargo—a mistake he later blamed on the teleprompter. As New York‘s Jonathan Chait writes, there is now reason to worry that Trump is similarly failing to prepare for the expected wave of hospitalizations as more people become infected, by declining to expand the stock of critical supplies. 

The federal health bureaucracy deserves much of the blame for America’s faltering response to the coronavirus outbreak. But the president has made the fiasco worse. 

The bureaucracy reports up to an executive, who is tasked with setting priorities and ensuring performance—and for taking responsibility when there are failures. Instead, Trump has inaccurately blamed the Obama administration for failures that occurred on Trump’s watch. (Indeed, under Barack Obama, diagnostic tests for swine flu were designed and approved in less than two weeks.) Asked whether any of this is his fault, the president rejected the idea, saying, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Trump’s refusal to admit failures makes it more likely that he will repeat them, and that more Americans will pay the price.

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Sacramento County Releases Inmates Early To Curb Coronavirus Spread

To minimize the spread of coronavirus, Sacramento County is releasing some jail inmates early.

Jails and prisons are ill-prepared for a coronavirus outbreak, thanks to poor sanitization, overcrowding, and the presence of elderly inmates. To reduce the risks to both inmates and staff—and, ultimately, to people on the outside as well—the Sacramento Superior Court authorized the sheriff’s office to release inmates with fewer than 30 days left on their sentence.

The California county’s accelerated release, as explained in a Tuesday order, shall continue through the end of May. The sheriff’s office says the change would cover just a handful of nonviolent offenders.

Sacramento isn’t alone. In another part of the state, Los Angeles County has decided as much as possible to issue citations rather than arresting people. The daily arrest rate has dropped from an average of 300 to 60 in the county, and the jail population has dropped b about 600.

On Monday, the city government in Washington, D.C., announced a plan to give the Department of Corrections more discretion to award credits for good behavior, which would help grant “immediate release of persons sentenced for misdemeanors.”

A group of 31 prosecutors associated with Fair and Justice Prosecution released a joint statement this week asking local governments to adopt cite-and-release policies for low-level offenses, to release individuals currently jailed merely for technical violations or because they can’t afford bail, to release non-dangerous inmates who are vulnerable to coronavirus or are within six months of the completion of their sentence, to ensure better medical care and contact with families and attorneys, and to reduce immigration enforcement, especially near medical centers.

“Elected prosecutors have an obligation to protect all members of the community including those behind prison walls and living in densely populated detention facilities,” Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, tells Reason. “Make no mistake, an outbreak of the coronavirus in incarceration and detention settings will spread quickly and impact not simply those behind bars, but our entire community. We must act now to reduce the existing detained populations and incarcerate fewer people moving forward. In doing so, we can not only help to reduce the spread of infection but also bring home people who no longer present a safety risk to their communities.”

Related: An Ohio county released 28 low-level offenders over the weekend to reduce the spread of coronavirus.

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Tulsi Gabbard, Advocate of a Less Interventionist Foreign Policy, Exits the Democratic Presidential Race

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii), a longshot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who garnered a small and eclectic following, has dropped out of the race and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden.

“It’s clear that Democratic primary voters have chosen Vice President Joe Biden to be the person who will take on President Trump,” said Gabbard in a statement. “Though I may not agree with the vice president on every issue, I know that he has a good heart, and he’s motivated by his love for our country and the American people. I am confident he will lead our country, guided by the spirit of aloha, respect and compassion, and help heal the divisiveness that has been tearing our country apart.”

Gabbard vowed to do everything she could to help Biden defeat Trump, demonstrating yet again that all the speculation she would run as a third-party spoiler candidate to help ensure Trump’s re-election—a theory peddled by Hillary Clinton, among others—was baseless and absurd. (And in any case, it was far from clear that Gabbard would have taken more votes from the Democratic nominee than from Trump.)

Gabbard also had kind words for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who is now the only remaining challenger to the presumptive nominee.

Her departure from the race is not a surprise: She had won just two delegates and was barred from recent debates. But Gabbard deserves tremendous credit for being the only candidate to put foreign policy at the center of her campaign. She doggedly called out the other candidates when they failed to reject the bipartisan consensus in favor of military intervention. She implored her rivals to denounce regime change in the Middle East, leveraging her status as a veteran to shore up her credibility.

Gabbard did other things to attract support from libertarian-minded individuals. She famously eviscerated Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) in the July CNN debate over the former prosecutor’s carceral history. And though she held mostly progressive economic views, she presented herself as an independent on issues pertaining to culture and identity politics.

Gabbard was one of just two Democratic candidates—Andrew Yang being the other—to show a real interest in building an alternative coalition that would include some libertarian-adjacent ideas. It will be interesting to see what she does next, she is not running for re-election to Congress in 2020.

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The Defense Production Act and Central Pandemic Planning

President Trump yesterday invoked the Defense Production Act, without actually issuing any orders pursuant to the statute. Part of the goal of this statute is to ensure that there is sufficient domestic capacity to meet national needs in times of emergency. For example, “the United States Government should encourage the geographic dispersal of industrial facilities in the United States to discourage the concentration of such productive facilities within limited geographic areas that are vulnerable to attack by an enemy of the United States.” In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, such concerns seems sensible. Many countries have restricted exports of critical goods, making it imperative that we have a domestic supply chain for those goods.

It’s too late for advanced planning. The statute, however, also empowers the government during an emergency. As explained in an excellent history of the statute prepared by the Congressional Research Service:

Containing seven separate titles, the DPA allowed the President, among other powers, to demand that manufacturers give priority to defense production, to requisition materials and property, to expand government and private defense production capacity, ration consumer goods, fix wage and price ceilings, force settlement of some labor disputes, control consumer credit and regulate real estate construction credit and loans, provide certain antitrust protections to industry, and establish a voluntary reserve of private sector executives who would be available for emergency federal employment.

Some of these, such as the power to “give priority to defense production” and to “fix wage and price ceilings,” amount at least in some measure to switching from a market economy to a command economy. The wage and price controls and some other powers have lapsed and are no longer in force, but some remain. For example, under 50 U.S.C. § 4511(a),

The President is hereby authorized (1) to require that performance under contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) which he deems necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense shall take priority over performance under any other contract or order, and, for the purpose of assuring such priority, to require acceptance and performance of such contracts or orders in preference to other contracts or orders by any person he finds to be capable of their performance, and (2) to allocate materials, services, and facilities in such manner, upon such conditions, and to such extent as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.

Meanwhile, Onur Ozgode offers an interesting tweetstorm with some relevant history. He argues that we are not capable of activating Defense Production Act emergency powers, because “we got rid of the mobilizers” and therefore no longer have the relevant expertise. It is plausible that running a command economy is a skill and that a government might improve with practice. What is less plausible is the claim that the emergency requires that the government switch to a command economy for certain kinds of purchasing. Indeed, Ozgode notes that when the government decided it needed to control critical materials during World War II, it ultimately used a relatively free-market method involving tokens, which he terms a “critical material backed money system.”

But of course there is no need even for such half-way measures. The government can purchase commodities that it needs using dollars, offering more dollars if necessary to compete with alternative private uses of commodities. Indeed, the use of ordinary currency helps make the trade-offs that government faces more transparent.

Why might one think that the government should switch to a command economy during the current pandemic? Or, differently stated, why wouldn’t companies that have the ability and incentive to produce needed goods and services (such as ventilators or hand sanitizer) do so on their own? Perhaps one reason is price controls from anti-price-gouging statutes. The camel’s nose at work: once the government starts enacting some restrictions, suddenly more government action is needed to offset the reduced incentives provided by the market. A different but related explanation is that we might be ethically uncomfortable with the results of market allocation. At least in the short term, production capacity may be limited, and we might not want billionaires buying their own personal hospital-grade ventilators and ICU beds. The power to prioritize government purchasing may be responsive to this concern. But one can imagine other powers might accomplish the same thing. For example, the government could enact a temporary ban on private individuals’ purchasing medical equipment currently in shortage for their own personal use, allowing such a ban to lapse in a time frame that would allow the market to adjust over the long-term to greater demand for ventilators.

The danger is that once the government increases its involvement, it will be tempted to increase production capacity by interfering in markets rather than by offering more money. There is no reason that the government should be in talks to prod car manufacturers to produce more ventilators. If pushed to switch production by anything other than economic incentives, manufacturers may not put as much effort into the task as necessary. For example, they might simply wait patiently for parts manufacturers to increase their supply, rather than offering them large incentives for production. Sure, the government can then try to persuade other companies to start producing more parts, but if the government must get involved in each link of the supply chain, fast production will not occur. If, on the other hand, manufacturers believe that the government will pay a sufficient amount for ventilators (an amount much higher than the typical cost), they will have incentives to overcome problems. I have previously described one approach for the government to stimulate ventilator production, but the more general point is that if we want more ventilators, the government or hospitals will need to offer more money, not interventions in the supply chain.

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Coronavirus Testing Finally Ramps Up, No Thanks to the Federal Government

Death by regulation. A Utah molecular diagnostics company is all set to produce 50,000 coronavirus tests per day, though its having trouble obtaining “reagent chemicals” that are necessary for a latter stage of the procedure, according to Deseret News.

Co-Diagnostics’ COVID-19 test, which costs just $10 per patient and produces results in only 90 minutes, is already in use in Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Greece, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Israel, South Africa and Canada. But in the U.S. it had only been available for certain entities and research institutions, per guidance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

It was not until Tuesday night that the FDA gave Co-Diagnostics emergency approval to distribute the test more generally to U.S. hospitals. Deseret News reports:

The company said U.S. shipments to date have been in accordance with the FDA’s policy change on Feb. 29 that allows certified U.S. laboratories to use the Co-Diagnostics’ test under certain conditions. As a result of the change announced Tuesday night by the FDA, the company’s test kit will soon be available for use by a wide array of U.S. laboratories, without first requiring emergency use authorization.

Co-Diagnostics CEO Dwight Egan said the rule change puts his company in a position to have positive impacts on the critical need for COVID-19 testing capacity in Utah, the U.S. and around the world.

“The ramifications of this new FDA policy are significant for our company,” Egan said in a statement. “This change will quickly afford Co-Diagnostics even more opportunities to serve the needs of laboratories nationwide, as we play an even larger role in responding to this pandemic.

“We applaud the FDA’s decision to recognize the dire need for increased access to high-quality COVID-19 tests, and to adapt as the situation demands in light of a public health emergency.”

It’s smart for the biomedical company CEO to publicly thank the powerful agency that holds the keys to its fate. But no one else should be thanking the FDA. The botched rollout of COVID-19 tests is largely the fault of America’s medical regulatory bureaucracy—specifically, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the FDA.

BuzzFeed has a terrific interactive article detailing everything the CDC and FDA did wrong, from refusing to test people with coronavirus symptoms unless they returned from China or had been in proximity to someone who had, to insisting on a “slow and labor intensive” process. But as recently as February 26, the CDC told state and local officials that its own testing capabilities were “more than adequate,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

People are quite literally going to die because the regulatory state was insufficiently adaptive to a crisis.

FREE MINDS

The coronavirus economy is wreaking havoc on local journalism, with Seattle’s The Stranger and the D.C. area’s Washingtonian already forced to lay off staff. Now COVID-19 has claimed another victim: Playboy will stop producing its print magazine for the rest of 2020, and probably forever.

“Last week, as the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic to content production and the supply chain became clearer and clearer, we were forced to accelerate a conversation we’ve been having internally: the question of how to transform our U.S. print product to better suit what consumers want today, and how to utilize our industry-leading content production capabilities to engage in a cultural conversation each and every day, rather than just every three months,” Playboy CEO Ben Kohn explained in a statement.

Playboy’s brand is still going strong in the world of online entertainment, and will continue to do so. But the demise of its print publication closes a consequential chapter in journalism. While the magazine has been criticized in the #MeToo era for caring only about men’s sexual appetites, it was positively liberatory when it first appeared in 1953, New York magazine argues:

Hard to imagine it now, but Playboy once felt forward-thinking and modern. Founded in 1953, it was a significant force in the loosening of anti-obscenity laws regarding the press. By the early 1960s, it was a huge success, soon expanding to open its namesake clubs all over the world. It also moved into TV with Playboy’s Penthouse (later Playboy After Dark), a late-night talk show of sorts starring [Playboy founder Hugh] Hefner and an array of celebrity guests. The magazine peaked in the early 1970s at a circulation, breathtaking to see now, of 5.6 million copies a month. The magazine’s licensing operation since then has put the signature rabbit logo on cocktail glasses, clothes, car accessories, and far more. Plus, of course, online porn.

Men (and some women) joked that they bought the magazine for the articles, even though the centerfold and its associated pictorials were, of course, the main draw. The articles were, indeed, pretty good, even if Playboy tended to pay extremely well for the second-tier writing of first-tier talents. (The Simpsons once showed a parody of the magazine, called “Playdude,” bearing the cover line UPDIKE ON THE MARTINI.) But that’s also a little unfair: Playboy published good work by Ursula K. Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates, and James Baldwin. At that part of the craft of magazine-making, Playboy was often great. Its lifestyle coverage, all that cocktails-and-great-stereo-equipment stuff, could be delicious as well.

Read Reason‘s 1986 interview with Christie Hefner, daughter of Hugh Hefner and former CEO of Playboy, here.

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