Why the national stockpile wasn’t prepared for this pandemic

“One thing that happened is that after the 2009 H1N1 pandemic there were a lot of masks distributed to states and localities and they simply weren’t replenished. Then there was a plan to purchase thousands more ventilators. A contract was signed with a small medical equipment company in Southern California. That company was then bought by a different medical equipment company, and in the end the contract wasn’t fulfilled. The new ventilators never came in.

So there are these matters of prioritization and inattention that can affect whether in fact we have the supplies that have been recommended in the stockpile.”

“There’s a key period that a lot of people are now focusing on, which is late January to mid-February. This is a point at which we were already aware of what had happened in China, and the World Health Organization had declared Covid-19 a “global health emergency of international concern.”

That was really the time to consider whether we had the supplies we needed of these essential items and to figure out whether the stockpile needed to be replenished rapidly and do whatever it took to make sufficient supplies available — whether that meant purchasing supplies from other sources or even using the DPA to force manufacturers to shift to production of ventilators, for example.

So even if it had not been replenished prior to this administration, there was a chance to do a better job at the outset.”

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/15/21210210/coronavirus-covid-19-national-strategic-stockpile

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