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by Octoth0rpe
2230 days ago
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The US never lost the ability to make masks. The issue is that unlike the tech industry, traditional manufacturing can't just spin up a thousand AWS instances to increase production 1000x fold, which is what the situation required. |
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From the below article:
"The Post reports Mike Bowen, owner of the largest surgical face mask producer in the US — Prestige Ameritech in Texas — contacted top officials in the Department of Health and Human Services on January 22, the day after the first US coronavirus cases were identified.
His pitch: Provide the funds needed to dust off four dormant manufacturing lines, and his firm would produce 1.7 million N95 masks every week. According to Bowen, he’d been raising the alarm for years that the US was too dependent on foreign countries (where nearly 90 percent of masks used in the country come from) for production, and argued his manufacturing lines offered both a way around that, and to ensure the US would have the masks it needed.
Rick Bright — the former director of HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (who was ousted in April, and later filed a whistleblower complaint alleging he was demoted for fighting for science-based preparations “over political expediency”) — pushed top HHS officials to accept Bowen’s offer, to no avail. Prestige Ameritech later exported a million masks to China."
... "The federal government went on to spend more than $600 million on contracts including mask production. Honeywell and 3M were given contracts worth more than $170 million to produce protective gear. And a tactical training company with no history of producing medical equipment was given $55 million to make N95 masks for $5.50 each — a price around seven to nine times greater than other suppliers, including Bowen’s company. Prestige Ameritech was eventually given a $9.5 million contract in early April to produce N95 masks for 79 cents each.
Bowen’s manufacturing lines, which could be making more than 7 million masks every month, remain unused."
https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronavirus-us-response-trump/2...