The claim about ventilators was one of the first dodgy claims I noticed but really the entire first part of the article is a pack of lies. Andreessen says:
"We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents"
This isn't amazing. The amount of testing being performed has scaled exponentially over the space of just a few months, from a standing start. In fact there's a lot of evidence that the supposedly exponential growth of the virus was really due to an exponential growth in testing, when positives are viewed as a proportion of overall tests done. It's not an indictment of "the West" that materials run out after such a vast acceleration - if anything I'm amazed it didn't happen earlier!
"We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds"
All three are in plentiful supply. Even in localised hotspots like New York problems are limited to a handful of hospitals.
I've been reading about the near deserted state of most hospitals for over a week now. I don't understand where Marc is getting his information from if he isn't aware of this.
"We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses"
Vaccines can't be created for a virus that doesn't exist yet regardless of how many vague warnings there are, so this isn't remarkable: it's inevitable. As for therapies, that's what ventilators and CPAP are.
"then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production"
Given the data appearing in a flood of new papers, showing that the virus is not dangerous enough to warrant current policy, no unusual rates of manufacturing scale-up will be required.
"it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives"
I'm actually on Marc's side on this one, in that I suspect current FDA approval processes are overkill. But this claim is also nonsense. FDA allows fast-track approval bypass for cases where someone is going to die without treatment anyway, and Ebola disappeared after 2014 - according to CDC the next time it was spotted was Zaire in 2018 with a grand total of 8 cases. That's not even close to "many lives".
"A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most."
Tax credits, quantitative easing, loan subsidies. The government has many ways to distribute money to people.
"At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard"
In fact making medical masks is hard. It requires special materials and machines, the supply of which can't be rapidly scaled up.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-factories-cant-keep-up-d...
Headline is literally "Factories are scrambling to make 20 times more face masks a day to keep up with demand amid coronavirus outbreak, but the masks are surprisingly difficult and expensive to make"
As for money, transferring money is easy. Figuring out the right amounts and the right people to send it to, without creating an explosion of fraud and waste - that's not so easy.