“All roads back to work and back to school lead through testing,” said Tennessee’s Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing he convened Thursday morning in Washington.
Alexander, as committee chairman, called the hearing, “Shark Tank: New Tests for COVID-19,” and he called on Dr. Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Gary Disbrow of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to talk about their efforts – as leaders of this new “shark tank” – to create new technologies designed to produce tens of millions of COVID-19 tests.
Congressional hearings are always as much about grandstanding as they are about inquiry, and this one was no different. After all, Alexander cast the project that he and Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt fathered in language that President Donald Trump and his supporters can understand: reality TV.
But the goal of encouraging a Shark Tank kind of competition is considerably loftier than just spectacle, and Alexander is to be commended for his push to use the capacities of government itself, in coordination with the private sector, to pull out all of the stops and create new technologies for producing tens of millions of diagnostic tests by August.
“There is no safe path forward to combat the novel coronavirus without adequate testing,” Alexander wrote last month in a Washington Post opinion piece unveiling the plan.