Monday, March 30, 2020

How Bad Regulation, Bureaucracy Slowed The Fight Against Deadly Wuhan Coronavirus

Amid all the political name-calling and finger-pointing over who's to blame and how to attack the Wuhan coronavirus, one thing surprisingly gets little mention at all: regulation.

We're happy to note that in recent days and weeks, President Trump has helped ease the regulatory burden of our response to the coronavirus, pushing Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, our main health agencies, to bend, suspend and in some cases upend useless rules.

To be blunt, U.S. health care regulatory agencies mishandled the crisis.

Worse still, as the virus began spreading, the CDC told health officials only to use a test it had created.

The National Institutes of Health, the agency that largely oversees America's public health research, is one example.

Dr. Paul Bracken, a renowned public health professor and researcher at Yale University, estimated in a speech to the NIH in 2016 that as much as 87.5% of health research is either wasted or inefficient.

As investigative journalist John Solomon recently noted, instead of spending money on major health threats, NIH has wasted resources on such things as studies of drunken monkeys and overweight lesbians, the impact of TV and gas generators on Vietnamese villages, and research that sought to answer the pressing question of whether 21- to 30-year-olds would lose more money gambling if they drank booze.


https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/30/how-bad-regulation-bureaucracy-slowed-the-fight-against-deadly-wuhan-coronavirus/

No comments: