Why isn't this being asked and discussed?
The bigger issue is the sheer cost of preparation against an exponentially-reproducing threat.
All other disasters can be prepared for with state of the art gear because they are, by nature, limited. Ergo, a limit amount of gear can be rapidly transported to location and will suffice.
In contrast, a pandemic requires "multiple for every single person" levels of stock. Which is outside most capitalist supply bohnds (i.e. no one can even produce that much stock).
N95s are used in many industries, and it’s a liquid market. Not hard to call up a big industrial distributor and say “hey, we have these masks that expire in 1yr, want to have a sale?”
Too many people were buying up shops of marks and sending them back to China. That hurts us even more.
If the goal is pandemic preparedness, it would probably be most efficient to just build and mothball production lines, doing limited runs yearly to exercise the machinery.
The government has more than enough land and warehouse space.
As far as I understand, none of the components (or machinery to produce them) are particularly cutting edge... just limited because they were sized for pre-pandemic sales volume.
The only responsible excuse is incompetence or negligence. We, the USA, were completely unprepared.
“Shelf-life” on non-perishable goods is highly conservative and often regulated by profit motive. Millions of N95 and P95 respirators were destroyed shortly before the pandemic due to “shelf life” and yet would have been a god send compared to having nothing or treating active COVID cases with a t-shirt or bandana over your face as happened in many US hospitals.
Proper planning could have rotated stock to maintain shelf life, slightly less proper planning could have realized the sheer stupidity of destroying working strategic materials due to an arbitrary and made up number.
This is Respiratory Pandemic 101. It's a threshold no expert should be tolerant of and/or should fail. Any other excuse is propaganda.
At the federal and provincial levels.
And no, they didn’t replace the stock.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/03/25/p...
If someone could produce even one document implying that this was discussed at all it would’ve been catastrophic.
They screwed up a bunch of things during COVID, but not many really trustworthy organizations actually just straight-up lied. Having something concrete to point to can’t help.
If they really wanted to save PPE for the hospitals, they could have made some calls to Walmart, Home Depot, and friends to pull it from the shelves. If it were an attempt at manipulation it would have been executed more smoothly.
Why? that sounds like a pretty reasonable measure to me. The government has every right to ask companies to limit supply or pull stock off shelves in a crisis. Hell, it could force them to if needed and bring back rationing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States
In these circumstances capitalism directs us to the cheapest solution. Not the most robust solution. The solution is basically government as a guaranteed buyer. Yet this factory never had that and went out of business and even in Covid times didn’t come back afaik.
Finally remember that mask-nationalism was popping up in 2020. China was restricting exports of masks and so was the U.S. and Europe. The difficulty of acquiring masks was not to be underestimated. There were additional sordid details of government sponsored programs being used to personally enrich certain (relatives of potus) people.
And during the alpha strain of Covid it turns out the relatively low infectiveness combined with droplet control via cloth masks actually did the trick and reduced spread. Pediatric flu deaths went from ~150 to 1 in the 2020 season. One! All thanks to distancing and masks. We literally made a strain of the flu extinct via masks.
https://news.3m.com/3M-Aberdeen-workers-make-1-billion-N95s-...
I guess 95 million a month isn't enough for everyone in the country to put a new one on weekly, but it probably covers a significant portion of institutional need.
It's amazing how quickly human fallibility is forgotten when the motivations align with ideologically.
The achilles heel of every conspiracy is the idea that everything that happens is 100% planned and intended.
They simply messed up. All they had to do was say nothing and reach out to the manufacturers making N95 masks and their retailers. Just going to Walmart and Amazon and getting them to pull their stock would have prevented the vast majority of people from getting their hands on them. A non-trivial number of Americans at the time had already been wrongly and loudly bleating about how masks were useless and about "controlling the population".
The CDC lying to the public was plain wrong. However well-intentioned, it was a terrible shortsighted error in judgement that cost them all credibility. The CDC is perhaps the one agency we most need people to trust and they proved themselves to be untrustworthy.