Tyler Cowen: commitment

Transcript context

…Thanks so much for having me on, Tyler, especially at such short notice. It’s really great to be able to talk about these issues with you. We will have our usual wide-ranging chat, but also a lot of focus on COVID-19. Let me start with a simple question. Why is testing in America, right now, so hard to scale up? I think we’ve got two basic problems. One is a coordination failure along the supply chain, and the other is a lot of small innovations that require a lot of regulatory engagement to get rapidly deployed that need to be really accelerated and coordinated. If you look deep into the supply chains where they’re producing the reagents, where they’re producing the test kits, there has not been a clear demand signal to those parts of the supply chain that we’re going to aim for a really high level of testing like we’re describing. Therefore, there’s a real unwillingness to make the fixed-cost investments to repurpose manufacturing, to supply tests at that level. We can go into why that’s the case in a minute. If you think of closer to the consumer, the issues are actually quite different. They’re not really about money. They’re much more about the fact that the current testing technology is extremely intrusive and very volatile. So —…

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