The COVID-19 pandemic had barely taken hold in the United States when principled libertarianism was reported to be among the early fatalities. “There are no libertarians in a pandemic,” Atlantic writer Derek Thompson quipped on Twitter on March 3. But that doesn’t mean libertarians haven’t made valuable contributions to the discourse surrounding COVID.

Paul Romer argued early on that government investment in massively expanded testing would be a bargain compared to the costs of letting the pandemic rage unabated. And this is one subsidy that many libertarian public voices eagerly endorsed. Yet the government is doing worse than nothing about these tests. Not only has the government neglected to subsidize them, it has put up obstacles so citizens can’t pay for them. Regulations are actively denying individuals access to valuable information about their own bodies that would help them avoid unknowingly spreading the disease.

More than 800 regulations were waived in response to COVID. While some of these will eventually come back into force, the pandemic has revealed how we’re better off without them.

Is there anything specifically libertarian about different dosing strategies? Not inherently. But the ideas owe much of their currency to the advocacy of George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok, and the debate centers on whether the bureaucratic decision-making processes of the FDA are adequate for responding to the current crisis. FDA procedures are designed for drug development and the certainty provided by time-consuming randomized control trials. As with early advice on masks and current restrictions on at-home testing, these standards may not serve us well in a rapidly progressing pandemic.

• Uncategorized