> I would have expected HN to entirely understand the FDA’s approach. Oh, I get it... I just think it is immoral. I also believe that the software developers w

> I would have expected HN to entirely understand the FDA’s approach. Oh, I get it... I just think it is immoral. I also believe that the software developers who go around thinking they are gods that should get to decide whether other people should be allowed to install an app on their phone or an extension in their browser because "people are (apparently) universally too stupid to have such functionality" are also deeply immoral, and have spent over half my life at this point--ever since I started working publicly on network scanners and decompilers through all of my work on jailbreaking the iPhone and now my latest efforts in decentralized systems--fighting against people who think like that (and I am even a politician now!). I strongly believe that people have a right to know things and get access to things that help them know things, and you aren't doing the world any favors by preventing such: you are just going to make people--100% correctly--distrust you and your motives. FWIW, I do see a job for the FDA, and I do appreciate some of the work they do... I would even have sympathy if this were "the tests are inaccurate or unproven, and the FDA doesn't want people to claim a test works that doesn't actually work and has never been tested" (note: I still have issues here, but I would at least have sympathy). But for a test we know works and can legitimately be used correctly in a home (but might theoretically be used incorrectly, sure) but we are just afraid people will do something bad with the information as they don't understand statistics enough to deal with false negatives or whatever? That is just evil, and it mostly stands in the way of actual good work being done. This is the reason why diabetics I know have had to hack into their hardware to cobble themselves full-loop control mechanisms. This attitude would have--in the story presented here--prevented people from having access to pregnancy tests... which should simply feel preposterous at this point in time when clearly at home pregnancy tests are extremely common (seemingly having required a legal challenge to the FDA over it!). And really... if you want to apply population-level analyses, that shouldn't even be the job of the FDA: that's the job of the CDC. And neither the CDC nor the FDA did a good job here of reacting quickly to this pandemic. A covid test even with relatively low accuracy can do wonders for neighborhood-level tracing efforts, but not only did the CDC never mobilize any kind of voluntary test sweeps, the FDA was proactively shutting down efforts by local universities to do it themselves. In the words of a friend of mine who is much more passionate about this than I am: "they have blood on their hands".