To me 63M doses of a cheap drug sounds like a really small bet. We should be willing to make lots of them, on the slightest hope, knowing that most will be wasted. Get 50 experts and fund anything which gets 2 votes.
"A lot of people are saying..."
It seems rather crazy to me, but perhaps more importantly, it is a strategy that - implemented literally - would result in the US leadership being very easily led by others "anywhere in the world" in matters of drug research, a situation which would be very amenable to manipulation for profit.
That's obviously wrong. We want the US leadership to be very easily led by Fox News personalities and whatever is popping on Twitter.
Hopefully not too many people did without needed medicine.
Probably there will be some suffering relating to stockpiling of steroids (dexamethasone, methylprednisolone), that we're now learning -do- work in the severely ill, too.
But a $100M or whatever check to ramp up production, or to buy wholesale stock from elsewhere, that would have been worth writing on day 1. Even on extremely flimsy evidence, given the huge daily costs of this thing. Run the careful trials at the same time as building a huge factory which you probably won't need.
The issue im presenting is they are buying them to be prepared to treat Americans IF it worked. But because they bought so many so quickly, it put Americans in a position where they weren't able to have medicine they needed. The government has a responsibility to balance current needs with possible immeidate future needs, it doesnt seem like they did.
Or was there enough retail panic-buying to generate shortages? If everybody with a prescription tried to buy 3 months worth, because they are scared of shortages, then I bet there would be shortages. (Isn't that exactly what happened with toilet paper?)