That’s not fairness. Chinese expatriates bought up a lot of the world’s stock of masks early on when the pandemic was limited to China. Also, ventilator shortages ended up not being a thing. Keep up. The world is not as simple as “America bad.”

Why? Out of malice and ignorance? No other country in the world ramped up masks immediately. People put too much stock in the presidency, a position held for 8 years max, and too little stock in the massive systems decades, or hundreds+ years old with incredible inertia that are really responsible for 90% of what happens in the world.

Taiwan, for example, definitely DID ramp up mask production immediately after understanding COVID-19's threat.

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3924318

The government there commissioned a "national mask team" task force... so there is some credence to the "poor governance" argument in the US.

Surgical masks as noted in the article, not N-95 masks which require the specialized equipment and materials.

Correct.

Turns out blanketing the population with surgical masks, which are designed to block the sputum coughed into the air by a sick person, is an effective tactic against a respiratory disease!

Just look at those idiot nerds, making surgical masks HAHA. They didnt get the Fauci memo about masks being useless

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/

Deaths: 10

Sure, and at this same time Europe still hadn’t, Nancy Pelosi was telling everyone to come party with her in SF Chinatown, Biden was still running campaign events, and the CDC was saying masks are ineffective.

Most people didn’t realize how bad covid was going to get, even the experts.

Nope, only Germany had the fiber machines, the reason they take a year to build is the global supply chain is so distributed, and you have to build many parts in series.

It's almost been a year and I don't see an end for masks in sight (even with vaccines). Anyone who didn't put money into more production of masks is just greedy. It certainly wasn't a matter of time.

They are, it just takes a year or so to build these mech/chem tech ology machines when the specialized work force is so small and the training takes so long for knowledge transfer... this flows all the way down to high purity polypropylene sourcing itself.