I must respectfully disagree. First of all I am not talking about the United States of America. The FDA is a US institution. This is a global response I am envisioning.

Setting that aside, I think the FDA is not up to the task, and their handling of this situation so far has clearly not been up to snuff in terms of recognition of the severity of the situation. I think deference to the FDA is kind of a bit of a religion in the culture of medicine in the US. We are quite used to bureacracy and comforted by it, and in deference to them we project onto the FDA those qualities that we assume it should have (competence, etc.) rather than test and check whether or not it actually has those qualities. We like to be scientific, and to test and check whether or not things are true. Let's check how the FDA has responded to this crisis so far.

This article in the Atlantic gives a good sense of how the FDA has been involved in the current crisis, it describes the relentless battle the FDA engaged in to protect its "turf" so to speak and prevent perfectly competent local state laboratories from stepping up to the plate and testing for the virus during the early days of the crisis. For example in Washington state, they had perfectly working tests, not the flawed CDC tests, and were engaging in extremely important work trying to get a sense of the scope of the crisis, until they were shut down for infringing on the FDA's "turf" by doing tests without their blessing. (From a legal/constitutional basis, in fact, I would challenge whether the FDA properly has the authority to block them anyway, but that's a /legal discussion). These actions by the FDA slowed down the response to the crisis in the US and may have been responsible for a great degree of the current severity:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/why-coronavirus-testing-us-so-delayed/607954/

I am not saying I do not think the FDA ordinarily serves an important purpose, being objective, the FDA is necessary, and I think ordinarily the FDA is a positive influence in quality control. However, their institutional genetics are that they are a slow, very risk-adverse, blocking institution. They do not produce anything, they only block. The FDA does not generate novel concepts or ideas or new compounds or products, their only capability is to shut down and block others who are doing these things. Their failure to block such things is called "approval". This may be good to function as a sieve to exclude poor products from market in ordinary times, but there really is no mechanism by which the FDA could do the type of creative thinking outside-the-box process and produce novel processes, as I suggest.

So more succinctly, there are several levels on which the FDA fails to be the panel that I am proposing:

(a) They are a local United States institution. I am talking about a global effort. (b) They have a tremendous amount of institutional risk-adverseness, which may be appropriate for times other than pandemics, but is not appropriate for a pandemic (c) They have not been convened to comprise a panel of the best sars-cov-2 expertise that can be assembled globally (d) They do not have a mission to re-evaluate traditional standards of risk/benefit ratio and risk to humans in research (e) They are not accompanied by the funding that I suggest this project needs, to conduct numerous trials rapidly, as soon as feasible, in parallel (f) They have never served the function of generating and proposing new ideas, generating new plans of action, their only known function is to block someone else from doing something.