Last Tuesday, I ordered four COVID tests the law said I was entitled to.

My wife will be leaving the country soon, so naturally they’ll come in handy. As far as I can tell, I’m supposed to be grateful for the can-do, aggressive spirit of our new administration that’s finally taking positive steps to help manage the pandemic. Testing, I’m told, saves lives. I wholeheartedly agree.

But here’s the rub. If testing really does save lives, what does lack of testing do?

Cast your minds back to 2020, when we were just learning about COVID. In any epidemic, it’s vital to be able to test for the disease, so that infected patients can be identified and isolated. The Center for Disease Control could have used tests previously developed by China or Germany, or at a minimum allowed others to use them (they have since proved extremely reliable). Instead they decided to develop their test. Time lost.

The Food and Drug Administration, in turn, forbade private companies from developing their own tests, granting Emergency Use Authorization only to the CDC. More time lost.

CDC’S initial batches of test kits were flawed, often shipped with key components missing. Hospitals couldn’t run the tests without permission from the FDA. Things got so bad, state public health officials begged the FDA for permission to make and run their own tests, which the FDA initially refused. Only after pressure from the medical profession did the FDA let up. (See the April 2020 issue of the AMA Journal for a scathing article on this point). More time lost.

The bottom line, as reported by the Washington Post, was that the CDC designed its test, and the FDA made sure that was the only test labs could legally use. When that test failed, we had no backup plan.

To any student of government, economics, or sociology, these examples of government failure are predictable. They’re not due to incompetence or stupidity. They’re systemic. They’re inherent in the nature of government regulation.

When a government agency is in charge of granting permission for something, they have no incentive to balance cost and benefits. Nor do they think about unintended consequences. They think only about what is easily seen, and what is politically relevant.

Releasing tests too early runs the risk of people dying from unsafe tests. Those victims would have been immediately visible and tragic. The public would have been outraged, and the media would have had a field day.

Releasing tests too late also runs the risks of people dying, because the virus will spread faster than infected patients can be identified and isolated. The difference is those deaths, while no less tragic, would be below everyone’s radar. No one would know who they were.

No cause of death would ever be listed as “failure to isolate in time”. No autopsy will read “Unnecessary exposure to COVID”. That means no angry relatives on morning talk shows, and no congressional hearings on “How could you, Bureaucrat Jones, have possible approved this in the first place?”

Given those facts, is it any wonder the FDA and the CDC act the way they do? To get them to act otherwise requires enormous pressure from well-organized groups. I’m thinking of AIDS activists in the 1980s, or public health officials in 2020. If on the other hand, you’re just a regular Joe who might be exposed to an unknown virus, then organizing politically isn’t feasible. You’re just stuck.

So finally, a year and a half after COVID arrived in America, I’m supposed to be impressed that the federal public health system has finally made it legal for the private sector to develop low-cost, reliable COVID tests that can then be purchased by the government and distributed at no cost to users.

Sure, without a doubt, that decision is saving lives. Good on them. Good on us.

But if testing really saves lives, what did a year and a half of banning testing do? The answer, I think, is obvious.

Time lost means lives lost. We will never know who they were. But we should not mourn them less.