Our regulatory regime is holding back American innovation and making public health crises worse, writes Sen. RandPaul. The CDC royally messed up COVID-19 testing and is now botching monkeypox testing. It doesn’t have to be this way.
hen the pandemic hit the United States, the Food and Drug Administration decided to approve only one kind of COVID-19 test, one that didn’t even work.
The FDA responded and told him the electronic application wasn’t good enough. He had to mail in a paper application, along with a copy burned on a CD or saved on a thumb drive — like it was the year 2000 again. And wouldn’t you know it — that very same day, the FDA decided to step aside and start letting individual labs test for COVID-19. We lost almost a month of valuable time that could’ve been used to ramp up testing efforts.But now, more than two years later, we are facing an outbreak of monkeypox, and the government’s response is the same all over again. The CDC continues to control all testing, while medical lab professionals across the U.S. are standing by to help..