Governments are frantically trying to contain and combat the coronavirus, and those efforts are important, but the world’s best hope is private innovation. Cutting-edge diagnostic tests and treatments are advancing, and government should encourage the trend.

President Trump recently ordered the Food and Drug Administration to “slash red tape like nobody’s ever done before” to make medicines approved for other illnesses available for coronavirus patients. The FDA is famously cautious, and safety is important. But drug regulators need to be more nimble during a pandemic with millions of lives at risk.

The FDA was slow to approve tests by private and public health labs, though recently it has approved a point-of-care test by small diagnostic company Cepheid that can return results in 45 minutes. In the biggest breakthrough so far, Abbott Laboratories has received approval for a test that it says can show positive results in five minutes. The company hopes to start delivering kits this week, ramping up production to 50,000 tests a day.

 

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