Where Did The Masks Come From? [Joe Mannix]

Last week, the Brandon (mal)administration launched its at-home COVID-19 test distribution program. As an adjunct to that, they also initiated a program to make N95 masks available to households. The plan is to distribute 400 million N95s (CBS/Outline) from the National Strategic Stockpile. This represents about half of available inventory of 737 million N95s (New York Post/Outline) currently in the Stockpile.

This raises a question for me given the history of the past two years. This question is not around whether this is a legitimate use for inventory in the Stockpile (I don't think it is), nor whether distributing N95s to wider populations will help with COVID-19 (I don't think it will). My question instead is "how do we have so many, and where did they come from?"

If we journey back in time to March of 2020, the topic of N95s in the Stockpile came up because of the shortage of PPE for medical staff. We saw stories - and comments from some of our Moron doctors - about medical staff needing to reuse N95s and how we didn't have enough of them in the Stockpile. The Seattle Times (via Outline) reported at that time that inventories were low due to resource exhaustion back during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009:

The H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 triggered the largest deployment in U.S. history of the Strategic National Stockpile, the federal government’s last-resort cache of drugs and medical supplies. The stockpile distributed 85 million N95 respirators...

But the stockpile’s reserves were not significantly restored after the 2009 pandemic, in the view of industry and public health experts. With a limited budget of about $600 million annually, officials in charge of the stockpile focused on what they say was a more pressing priority...

So back in 2009, the Stockpile distributed 85 million N95s and most of those were not replenished after the H1N1 outbreak. This was the cause of Trump's "the cupboard was bare" remarks and the inevitable fact checks that followed them (NBC/Outline). We distributed more of them from the Stockpile for COVID-19 response and faced severe shortages in keeping medical personnel adequately supplied. Yet now we're going to distribute almost 5x more than the quantity that left the Stockpile dangerously depleted in 2009.

So where did they come from? How do we now have so many that they're comfortable burning through more than half of them with this new program? I can only think of three possibilities:

1. There never was a shortage and we had plenty in stock, but we either didn't know where they were (they were lost) or the inventory was lied about by bureaucrats and politicians.
2. There was a shortage, and Warp Speed and other measures like the Defense Production Act has alleviated that shortage and we now have a surplus so large that we can afford the draw-down.
3. There is still a shortage and the N95s aren't actually in the Stockpile in that quantity, and the (mal)administration is lying about it and hoping that not many people take them up on it.

Of those, I doubt the first is true. It's possible, I just doubt it. The third could be, but I also think that is not very likely. My nickel is on door number two - and Trump will get zero credit for fixing that problem to such a degree that Brandon's handlers can now exploit the inventory for a PR stunt.

posted by Open Blogger at 03:20 PM

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