OPINION:
Reading the FOIA’d Fauci emails, it becomes clear just how much our supposedly trusted officials didn’t know about COVID-19 when the pandemic started. The conclusion led to some bad decisions, like pushing for us all to be masked and kept home from school and work instead of focusing on isolating those we knew early on were in the most high-risk populations.
We complied, somewhat testily in many cases, because we tend to give our public officials wide latitude where our health and safety are concerned. In general, we like for government to leave us alone but, when a disease like the novel coronavirus appears to be running rampant, we take orders.
The government got many things wrong during the pandemic, but it also got a few critical things right. Regulatory burdens were eased that put us on the road to a vaccine in record time and helped us overcome shortages of essential personal protective equipment like hand sanitizer, which many of us used repeatedly over the course of each day to keep the coronavirus at bay.
This immediate ramp-up of supply was managed by new manufacturers with limited experience trying to fill a need. This is an example of the free market at its best. Surging increases in demand were met — but also led to unintended consequences. Americans may be laisse faire in most economic sectors but cast a doubting eye to “caveat emptor” where health and safety are concerned.
The response to the pandemic led to mishandling, mislabeling and misleading information about some of these new hand sanitizer products despite what we presume to have been mostly good intentions on the part of their manufacturers.
The leap of so many new firms into the marketplace resulted in lower efficacy rates and reports of products being made with dangerous ingredients unsafe for human use. After four people in Arizona died due to ingesting hand sanitizer containing methanol, Steve Dudley, director of the of the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center said, “The flip side is that supplies can’t keep up with demand, so what we think is happening is we have all these other manufacturers who are coming in and saying, ’Oh there’s money to be made here, we can produce hand sanitizer.’ And they’re not properly distilling it or properly producing it and they’re getting methanol in the byproducts.”
The FDA has identified 230 hand sanitizer products marketed in 2020 that were unsafe or ineffective. Now that mass-vaccination has caused the pandemic to subside — another example of how and why cutting red tape matters — and we once again have abundant, reliable access to high quality products we can trust, it’s time to review the rules.
This is especially important as schools return to normal and begin to readmit students on a full-time basis. The teachers’ unions and some parent groups have demanded heightened hygiene practices be continued as a pre-condition of allowing government schools to reopen. If we are going to force hand sanitizer on our children when they return to school in the fall, the CDC needs to produce guidelines ensuring it is used properly and that what is used is safe.
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