This is a friendly criticism of Trump’s response to Corona virus and an overall look of how a pandemic would be handled in a free society.
I call this criticism friendly because it is not Trump’s fault after all that we as a society decided to centralize our healthcare response to infectious diseases in the hands of a few organizations, mainly CDC, WHO, and FDA. When power and decision making is concentrated this much, mistakes tend to impact entire nations and even the world.
As an objectivist and ideologically biased toward freedom and liberty, I believe that government should be limited to its only proper roles. Dealing with pandemics threatening the population, is actually part of the overall role of government to protect its citizens. However, the production of vaccines, of viral tests, and of other health products and services is not. So lets take a look at Trump’s response to corona virus.
Trump’s first move was to issue travel bans. This is a legitimate move, the government does have the right to limit people’s movement in a face of some physical threat, in this case being an infectious disease. However, the data shows that travel bans do not work in preventing the virus from spreading to your country. They can slow down the spread, they will limit the amount of people initially infected in your country, but they will not prevent the disease from arriving. Knowing this, Trump should have continued to act, but did not, why? He bought him self time with the travel ban, but made no significant moves, and as a result wasted a lot of precious time. Was it his arrogance in thinking, that a travel ban alone would suffice? The next step would have been to start doing testing, so that you can identify the individuals who contract the virus and hopefully quarantine them to continue to limit the spread of the disease. Unfortunately Trump decided to reject purchasing tests from WHO and decided to rely solely on CDC. Again, why? Was it because of his irrational belief that everything must be American made? CDC ended up providing faulty tests, and really only now, as I am writing this, is America getting a significant amount of tests shipped out.
How would this be handled in the free society, where organizations like CDC and FDA don’t have monarchical control over healthcare? Well I imagine the president would similarly issue a travel ban, this would buy the country sometime to organize a response. The next step, as stated above, is massive wide testing, lets call it testing on demand, similar as video streaming on demand, where if someone wants to be tested because they feel they may have been exposed, they can get tested. If you can diagnose people with corona virus then you can effectively control the corona virus. Healthcare organizations would be free to produce and ship test kits, and similarly healthcare organizations would be free to purchase these test kits without needing permission from CDC. Right now our government has effectively created a shortage of test kits, and as a result they had to ration the tests by issuing guidelines about who can get tested.
In a free society there would be no such shortage, and we could effectively have testing on demand. People who travel or attend public events could self screen by going to a testing facility. These tests would not be free, so there would be an incentive to both produce the tests and provide the testing. The government could potentially purchase a number of tests themselves and provide them at no cost so certain healthcare facilities, but overall if you wanted to purchase a test your self, you would be able too.
Technically testing on demand could be achieved in our current society as well, with government control. South Korea for instance currently has drive through testings that only takes about 10 minutes. However, that is the problem with relying on one organization for your healthcare response, if they mess up, the entire country suffers. What accountability or incentive is there for the CDC to do well. Will people get fired for their mistakes, will CDC lose funding, will another organization take over market share if they handle situations poorly? Nope. This is really the crux of the problem, we have assigned decision making power to people who suffer no consequences for being wrong. This is the dumbest way to do things. Now don’t get me started on the FDA, and how long its going to take to get a vaccine out if we follow their rules.
