But actually pretty much all countries have stumbled into the same problem. A respiratory pandemic of this magnitude wasn't anticipated by anyone, for reasons that should be investigated further. Now it's very easy to say there should have been a bigger stockpile, but a lot of the voters, especially in the GOP are quite sensitive to government spending, especially for healthcare.
And it's important to remember that there are probably other things countries need stockpiles of, with a similar anticipated risk. For example dialysis machines for a kidney disease pandemic. These things add up quickly, and all you can do is make an educated guess of how far to anticipate any such threat.
For scale: Hospitals got some $100 BILLION from Congress for CoronaVirus.
Right, we had close calls in the near past, but why did they not spread like this one?
But you can't be lucky all the time.
This virus is extremely uncommon in that it is both severe, highly transmissible and a completely new type of virus.
I really don't think most people in developed countries would have agreed to spend a couple Billion Dollars to have reserves in the healthcare system, including ventilators, hospital beds and personnel, in order to prevent a problem a couple of magnitudes bigger than anticipated.
Very true, but USA, China, EU, Russia, India etc have their militaries ready to go with Plan A, B and C, they don't order bullets once invaded.
We all knew that pandemics are part of life, so we should have had warehouses full of this stuff. USA is spending about $700 BILLION a year in military matters and untold trillions in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, at least USA does not need an open source one, we can afford to pay whatever price they sell it for. They neglected this and of course now it's too late. 100K ventilators at, say,$25K each = $2,500,000,000 unless I made a mistake. What's $2.5 Billion to USA?