> What happened next is a lesson about leaving disaster response to the whims of capitalism. Companies did exactly what the government wanted them to do: make

> What happened next is a lesson about leaving disaster response to the whims of capitalism. Companies did exactly what the government wanted them to do: make hand sanitizer as fast as possible and at massive scale. The lesson here is about leaving disaster response to governments. The FDA had a bunch of tactics it could have used. It could have continued to do inspections and changed the rules to say if you don't pass you have to display a notice of that prominently on the bottle. It could have kept the rules and just let companies scale up within the limits. Or most obviously, it could have bothered double-checking and realized that hand sanitizer wasn't going to do anything about a virus that spreads via cloud-like aerosols. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 spread this way was widely known to independent skeptics by the time the company in the article was applying for permission to make sanitizer. What happened on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship demonstrated that the virus must be spreading through air ducts, rendering lockdowns, hand sanitizers and masks all useless. It was also expected because SARS-1 spread this way too, and because masks had never had an impact on respiratory illness before either. All this was ignored because the medical establishment didn't know what to do if this fact was recognized. They preferred to tell people to engage in pointless and self-destructive behavior rather than say, ok, maybe there's nothing we can do except let doctors get on with it. This aerosol denial was never formally ended and so large parts of the population is still unable to process reality even today, especially in academia and healthcare. Instead they invent ever more bizarre and desperate attempts to try and explain the abject failures of all these mitigations.