Dilbert cartoonist-turned-political Scott Adams stunned MSNBC viewers on Monday by predicting, on the air, that President Donald Trump would win re-election.
On Tuesday morning, Adams had practical advice for Trump: announce a “road map” towards making cheap home tests for coronavirus universally available.
Adams noted an article at Reason.com explaining that technology for cheap coronavirus home testing is being developed. Reason’s Ronald Bailey estimated that every American could eventually be tested, every week, at a total annual cost of $20 billion:
It would cost around $20 billion to provide 330 million Americans with rapid at-home test kits costing $1 each for weekly use. Given that the federal government has already borrowed $3 trillion in response to the pandemic and appears interested in borrowing trillions more, that would be a real bargain. Such a testing regime “will stop the vast majority of transmission and it will cause these outbreaks to disappear in a matter of weeks,” Mina said. “This is something we can actually do at warp speed.”
The problem, Bailey explained, is that such tests are currently illegal: “It took Food and Drug Administration regulators until July to finally issue the agency’s template for approving tests that ‘can be performed entirely at home or in other settings besides a lab’ and without a prescription.”
Adams suggested that Trump would be “guaranteed” a win in November if he would address the problem, and create a one-page “road map” with a timetable for producing cheap, universal, weekly at-home testing:
He would need to produce a road map — a very simple road map — that says: here’s where we are, and by this date we’ll have enough tests that every person can get a test for a dollar at home, and you’ll have quick results.
Now, if he told us that here’s where we are, and here’s the day that we’ll have enough tests, I would feel like I saw the end of the pandemic. It might not be, but it would certainly feel like it, wouldn’t it? I would just like visibility on it. I would like to know, is there an FDA obstacle? If there is still a legal obstacle, when will that be removed? And how long does it take these companies to ramp up? Give us a little visibility into those companies, and tell us how close they are. Just sort of put it on paper: one page, here’s where we are, here’s the date we’ll have enough tests to test our way out. 20 billion dollars.
I would feel that that would pretty much settle the election, really. Because the coronavirus situation is going to turn on how scared you are about the pandemic. And that would take a lot of the scare out of it.
Adams successfully predicted Trump’s 2016 victory, and wrote a book about it: Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.
On MSNBC, Adams explained that voters in November would be motivated by “what’s scariest.” He noted that Trump had “solved a lot of scary problems,” like radical Islamic terrorism, but that the coronavirus is the “ultimate scary thing.”
If Trump were to lose, Adams believes, the coronavirus pandemic would be the reason — but it is something he can still do something about before Election Day.
Breitbart News
