The late, great economist Milton Friedman used to point to the Food and Drug Administration as an example of a government agency that killed tens of thousands of people every year. This declaration stunned and even enraged people.
How could an agency that is supposed to help develop, test, and certify the safety of new drugs be guilty of killing people?
Friedman’s point was that the long and cumbersome five- to 10-year drug approval process at the FDA can be deadly. If a new drug to prevent strokes comes along and saves, say 50,000 lives a year, how many lives were lost because of needless bureaucratic delays?
The point was well-taken: Even when well-intentioned regulations can do more harm than good in promoting health and safety.
As we look over the past two years of COVID, how much of what the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told us about this disease and sold it as “science” has turned out to be true? The CDC has changed its tune of mask-wearing at least three times to our knowledge, while treatments that have shown promising results for those who have contracted COVID have been flatly rejected by health officials in Washington—in some cases only because Trump endorsed them.
Amazingly, more than a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, there is no confirmed chairman of the agency. This would be like not having a secretary of defense in the middle of World War II.
Meanwhile, the FDA has become so politicized that its top two vaccine officials resigned in protest months ago and the agency has almost completely stopped convening its outside expert panel. That panel’s advice was routinely second-guessing the wisdom of Biden’s rules, and often was summarily overruled by the health bureaucracy.
Why was there never an effective vaccine developed to deal with the Omicron variant? Trump got the original life-saving vaccine to combat the Delta variant in just eight months. The same agency that Warp-Speeded three vaccines from nothing in less than a year under Trump hasn’t been able to update them for the actually circulating variants in a year under Biden.
Developing and approving a vaccine or treatment for Omicron should have been a hop, skip, and a jump, although Operation Warp Speed under Trump has become Operation Snail Speed under Biden.
Meanwhile, there is pressure to greenlight a vaccine for newborns to children under the age of 5. Why? There is close to zero risk of an infant or young child dying or getting seriously sick from the Omicron variant. The long-term health impact of injecting a newborn with the vaccine is completely unknown. Government approval would give billions of taxpayer dollars to the pharmaceutical industry for a vaccine of questionable value.
When it comes to COVID, we need vaccines for the elderly, not the very young.
Most unforgivable of all, the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, and the CDC (under the guidance of people such as Dr. Anthony Fauci) were all caught napping when COVID hit these shores. That’s the real scandal that no one in the media will investigate. The combined budgets of these three agencies—whose main mission should be to keep society safe from and prepared for killer pandemics, as we saw in 1918, when the flu pandemic killed millions of Americans—is well above $50 billion.
What was all this money used for? Where did it go?
Here’s my suspicion from reading the webpages of these health agencies: The government officials were preoccupied with highlighting trendy matters of concern to the far left, such as LGBTQ issues, gun violence, racism, and even climate change.
Talk about taking your eye off the ball.
If Republicans take charge of Congress after the 2022 November midterm elections, they should make a priority of investigating the malfeasance at the FDA and the CDC. We spend over $1 trillion a year at the federal level on health care, and the system tragically failed us under its biggest test.
