 up a topic I want to talk about FDA. I want to talk about the FDA the right to try right to try by the way allows patients who are dying only if they're dying to use experimental FDA drugs it still requires a whole process and it's still cumbersome and difficult and nowhere near as easy as it should be but it's better than it was before and Trump gets credit for that but that does bring up the FDA and the FDA just put up this week new standards for the production of home kits for testing for COVID. You'll be able to test at home you'll be able to get results within minutes rather than within days or weeks it'll be easy no pinprick no but all at home everything will happen at home and they are companies that wanted to offer this a couple of months ago and the FDA stopped it now they've actually put out a plan the criteria for what they would approve in terms of home kits and from what I've seen the companies are basically saying you're insane with these kind of requirements it'll never be profitable never be commercial never be possible for us to produce the kits that'll happen sometime next year maybe I mean the idea would be ideally to lower the cost to about a dollar test a dollar test and it is possible but the FDA wants these to be too good something can be too good for example if you make the test kit super super accurate so it can test very low viral loads that would be wow that would be amazing but that would be really expensive and very difficult to put in a home kit even the commercial kits that out there have a hard time doing it but you could make a pretty cheap one that only detected very high viral loads but when are you when are you when can you infect other people now when you have a low viral load when you have a high viral load so why not give people the option of testing themselves and when they have a high viral load they would know not to go out not direct with other people isolate themselves low viral load with social distancing and all that no big deal things like that things that have to do with logic and common sense and taking account how people use something and some you know the kind of logic and common sense that markets produce the kind of products that markets create that don't have to be perfect by the standard of some central planner but a good enough good enough so we're probably not going to get home kits again we probably could have had them two months ago we're probably not going to get home kits because of the FDA and of course this is just one minor concern I have with the FDA you know the FDA even with the now right to try law the FDA is responsible for the deaths of thousands of hundreds of thousands of potentially millions of people every year because of the cost that it loads up on drugs it makes it so difficult to produce now look somebody would have to have to be some screening of drugs they wouldn't just go to market you would have to test them and screen them and so on and doctors wouldn't prescribe drugs unless they were tested and so on but imagine if that were done in a competitive market imagine the cost savings and also imagine if people had the option not just dying people but all people had the option of evaluating the risks that they were willing to take instead of just saying oh no it causes in 10% of patients it causes heart disease drug x patient being able to say but you know what it helps so much my other problems that I'm willing to take the risk of higher of heart disease that 10% of patients incur and another patient would say you know what that risk of heart disease really really scares me I'm not willing to take it imagine putting the decision on a doctor and a patient on individuals rather than on a bureaucratic entity that has all all the wrong incentives now I don't believe that it would be drug companies selling directly to doctors and they would I truly believe there would be a privatized a private equivalent to the FDA because you don't want a situation in which one rogue drug company and you do want standards of testing but I think the standard of the testing would be determined competitively there would be labs to test drugs that would do the equivalent of phase one phase two phase three testing some of it would done by the company and somebody would some of them would be done by the labs the labs would then review the results presented it to it the labs get presented to them they would evaluate it they would review it they would test it and they would give doctors a rating of how what they think this drug is good for what they think the risks are and they will let doctors decide and labs might even give the drug an F and they would let doctors know it's got an F I wouldn't use it and my guess is that doctors would pay for the service rather than drug companies because doctors are the ones that have the strongest incentive to have accurate information about the drugs that they are prescribing to their patients and you could imagine a whole insurance liability structure that would make this function in a way that did not create negative incentives but that requires imagination and that you know that's the beauty of free markets is they do these things these things are created entrepreneurs come up with ideas they build they create they produce the FDA is just an obstacle for all of that a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic nightmarish institution that basically not just does it make drug development super expensive but it makes some drugs just not worth the while of companies to produce because of the risk that they're not get approved and because of the cost involved I mean I think the same would happen with food with a lot of things you'd have middle men who would work for the grocery stores inspecting the agricultural produce that they were buying rather than a government agency and probably wouldn't be something super marketed themselves I think you'd have a whole field a whole industry develop there would basically a private sector industry who would replace what the FDA does today what we need today what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason by the intellect not by feelings wishes women's or mystic revelations any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the spare cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to 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