There were three major disincentives for states to do this.
First, without a coordinated response there were dozens of high demand buyers and low supply. The market did its thing and State Governments were being forced to pay very high prices for PPE. States were bidding against each other and bidding against the Federal Government, this drove the price even higher.
Second, even when States could secure PPE, the Federal Government was seizing PPE and testing supplies to send it to Coronavirus Taskforce approved vendors who would then sell the seized goods back to the States at inflated prices. This got so bad that Maryland's Governor, after using his South Korean wife's connections to secure testing supplies from South Korea, placed them under the protection of the National Guard to prevent the Federal Government from absconding with them. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/maryla...
Third, the State budgets are shot to hell. When the public health crisis started it was easy to say, let's do what it takes to keep people safe. Now a sizable chunk of the citizenry is refusing to wear masks or social distance, and the State coffers are running empty. State leaders are faced with deciding if they want to use the limited funds left at their disposal to try purchasing PPE in the face of a constituency that is going to spread and worsen the public health crisis regardless. It's lose-lose for the decision makers, so they are disincentivized to follow this path. They can spend the last of the treasury on PPE just to watch it evaporate as cases soar.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/hospitals-face-a-whi...
The claim is "dubious", so (therefore) there was exactly no reason for this to happen?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dubious - "questionable or suspect as to true nature or quality"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exactly - "in a manner or measure or to a degree or number that strictly conforms to a fact or condition"
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/08/donald-tru...
> One thing the stockpile clearly doesn’t have enough of is face masks. News reports found that the N95 face masks were not substantially replenished after H1N1 in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. (continues)
https://www.dailywire.com/news/obama-admin-allegedly-deplete...
> “The national stockpile used to be somewhat more robust. In 2006, Congress provided supplemental funds to add 104 million N95 masks and 52 million surgical masks in an effort to prepare for a flu pandemic,” Bloomberg News continued. “But after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/06/828303817/surgical-mask-manuf...
> KELLY: I mean, I have read that since that experience, you have been sounding the alarm. I know you wrote to President Trump. I know you wrote President Obama before him, warning that it wasn't going to be if but when that there would be another...
> BOWEN: I'm not. No. No, no, no. You know, I have been off and on. Of course, I've been selling this message for 14 years, but I'm really not angry. I'm puzzled. And I think what I've been fighting is not the government, not President Obama, not President Trump. I think it's human nature. I think since everybody ignored it - I mean, reporters ignored it. Pandemic experts ignored it. Our government ignored it. Hospitals ignored it. Everybody ignored it. So to me, it's a human nature problem. So I'm over my anger.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XMOzAY...
> “Prestige Ameritech is presently the lone voice warning of the insecure U.S. mask supply,” Bowen wrote to President Barack Obama in June 2010. “Apathy and inertia are our biggest hurdles.”
(Note that this is from The Washington Post)
I don't disagree that there's no GOOD reason for this to happen, other than the unfortunate reality that human beings are not very good at thinking, at least compared to how well we perceive ourselves to think. As far as I can tell, almost all humans are living in some sort of a severe state of delusion at all times, our minds and societies haven't had nearly enough time to evolve to accommodate the massive increase in complexity in the last few hundred years, let alone the last 20.
More importantly, the current president didn't spend the first 3 years in office replenishing the stockpile and didn't take an offer from a former mask manufacturer very early in the outbreak to increase the production rate.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2020/04/02/trump...
Obama behaved no differently.
The presidents could not differ more in:
- lead time between inauguration and first epidemic reaching the USA (6 weeks versus 3 years)
- seriousness with which the presidential transition team took pandemic response
- the authority given to pandemic response (Obama made NSC responsible while Trump made HHS responsible)
- speed and intensity of initial response once the outbreak was identified
- empowerment medical professionals
- use of Defense Production Act
- treatment of WHO, CDC, and FDA as institutions"the presidential responses to 2009 H1N1 versus 2020 SARS-CoV-2" was not the topic of conversation. The topic of conversation was:
>>> If you want an increase in mask supply, you have to either allow the pricing mechanism to do its job, or force people to make masks.
>> Those aren't the only options. Some mask manufacturers could scale up manufacturing as long as they had a medium/long term contract to make the investment worth it. The current administration keeps blaming the previous one for drawing down on the federal PPP supply without replenishing it (dubious claim), so there was exactly zero reason for this[1] to happen.
>> [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-d....
You are now expanding the scope of your original argument. Before we do that, can we finish with your first point?
Did the Obama administration refill the inventory of masks after they were drawn down, or not? My reading of the evidence is that they did not, does your reading leave you with a different conclusion, are you maybe referring to different evidence than what I posted above?
Those aren't the only options. Some mask manufacturers could scale up manufacturing as long as they had a medium/long term contract to make the investment worth it. The current administration keeps blaming the previous one for drawing down on the federal PPP supply without replenishing it (dubious claim), so there was exactly zero reason for this[1] to happen.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-d...