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> companies are always scheming, wicked villains I believe the baseline assumption is that many people are trying to make a buck, and something like coronaviru

> companies are always scheming, wicked villains I believe the baseline assumption is that many people are trying to make a buck, and something like coronavirus is a great opportunity to scam people. Is that wrong? I'll bet if I purchase ten coronavirus test kits "from the internet", at least 9 out of 10 will be bogus. In the absence of regulation, that would be 13 out of 10. There's a potential for truly massive scams: 7 billion people want something in tight supply, just announce you've got a test kit for $19.95, maybe mail people some pH test strips or nothing at all, and retire to your own private island. One of the reasons government exists is to protect the populace from threats to their health such as health scams.

ggreer 6y ago
The way that most industries solve this problem is through accreditation and branding. If Apple made a test that was endorsed by Consumer Reports, you can bet good money that it's effective. The FDA & CDC shipped their own tests that were bogus. What's worse: They threatened researchers who invented their own tests that worked.[1] Thanks to the government's incompetence, testing was delayed by a month in the US. 1. From https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...: Later that day, the investigators and Seattle health officials gathered with representatives of the C.D.C. and the F.D.A. to discuss what happened. The message from the federal government was blunt. “What they said on that phone call very clearly was cease and desist to Helen Chu,” Dr. Lindquist remembered. “Stop testing.”