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[Discourse] America Remains Vulnerable to COVID-19 Scams
Here are the loopholes the FDA should close.
Editor's note — an abridged version of this piece featured on Discourse, a magazine of The Mercatus Center at George Mason University (GMU).
When you’re oozing blood, everything looks like a gauze pad. As states and hospitals scour the world for direly needed COVID-19 supplies, the FDA’s efforts to catalyze the inflow have come into conflict with its mandate to ensure that all medical devices entering the US meet the appropriate standards.
America entered the pandemic with one of the world’s most stringent regulatory regimes for medical device importation, overseen by the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH). To deal with the supply crunch, the relaxing of rules endeavored since — a policy followed by most every country hit by the virus — isn’t misguided per se, though it has opened a range of loopholes that scammers haven’t failed to seize on. Yet scams are hardly a fatality even in these circumstances, and the FDA should strive towards a better balance between the widespread availability of devices and their meeting basic standards by learning from recent experience to guard American patients against any future nefarious scams.
