If they knew that every decade or so, they might temporarily be able to sell at 5x the normal price for 3 months, they’d likely run their outbound supply chain slightly less just-in-time.

Ironically, this might make things less likely to get to the point where the market price was 5x normal.

They run them less just-in-time that you think, e.g. 3M were able to double production in a couple of months [1]. I'd say that's pretty impressive, but what do I know. Regardless, preparing for these events is the government's job, including stockpiling the required PPE. In fact, in a bunch of countries the stockpiles were scaled down or simply never replenished because it was deemed an unnecessary expense (France, Belgium, Canada).

[1] https://www.startribune.com/3m-s-complicated-road-to-enough-...

Good thing that almost everyone fucked up the pandemic response so the demand is here to stay, eh?