During the H1N1 crisis France made a strategic reserve. Latter governments reduced the inventory. It was not renewed in the end.

> Face masks have been shown to be effective at controlling pandemics, and apparently no one (in many western countries) thought to stockpile those.

You're dropping the context of the hard decisions nations and governments actually deal in day to day, year to year when it comes to budgets. That's why not a single country had a proper stockpile of N95 masks for a pandemic like this. That isn't an exaggeration: literally not one nation had enough of a stockpile for this scenario, that includes South Korea, Japan, China.

To say that nobody thought to do it is outlandish. As one example Congress set aside funds in 2006 to stockpile 100 million N95 masks. That's not strange, as many people were aware of the need to maintain such a stockpile. There is a big difference between being aware of the need, proposing plans and spending for it, and actually getting billions of dollars on a recurring basis to maintain the necessary proper stockpile perpetually with no event to push it with (yeah but we had a flu pandemic in 1957! try selling that premise). That's the actual reality of budgets and governments.

It's expensive to maintain a persistent minimum stockpile of 1 billion non-expired N95 masks to cover the US population and the demand the US has seen. If it's a year-long pandemic, a billion masks isn't enough. You need several billion masks in that scenario. Coming out of the great recession, that is a very hard budget decision for all nations. And the fact is, most nations can't afford to do it at all. The easy retort of course is to say, well, look at the damage from this virus compared to that cost for masks. That's purely hindsight spouting that tries to pretend a comprehensive reality doesn't exist and that people who make budgets don't have to deal with difficult decisions every single year (while not factoring in every possible bad scenario every time they make a budget).

And let's not pretend it's enough to stockpile masks, regarding spending allocations. If we're doing hindsight fantasy, let's be correct about it. You need to constantly maintain a lot of other gear and training for a pandemic, costing large sums of money. In an ideal scenario a nation the size of the US should probably have over a million ventilators stockpiled, just in case. We should probably maintain 2x or 3x the ICU capacity we have, on a persistent basis and at a large cost.

This isn't an argument against being more prepared. Of course every nation should have a vast magical stockpile of N95 masks that never depletes, even the ~140 poor nations of the world that can't afford to do it. The point is, it's difficult to convince any nation to do it at the required persistent scale, and most can't afford to do it regardless.

Facemasks are only produced in a handful of countries. In fact we basically don’t even have the skill set or machinery here to convert factories to producing facemask even if we wanted to. Garment work was moved offshore decades ago.

Unlike off-patent prescription drugs.