Hacker News Reader

Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

> Again, a crap situation, but one that the CDC wasn't responsible for.

They simply messed up. All they had to do was say nothing and reach out to the manufacturers making N95 masks and their retailers. Just going to Walmart and Amazon and getting them to pull their stock would have prevented the vast majority of people from getting their hands on them. A non-trivial number of Americans at the time had already been wrongly and loudly bleating about how masks were useless and were really about "controlling the population".

The CDC lying to the public was plain wrong. However well-intentioned, it was a terrible shortsighted error in judgement that cost them all credibility. The CDC is perhaps the one agency we most need people to trust and they proved themselves to be untrustworthy.

View on HN

In Canada, it was partly a coverup for the government destroying the N95 & PPE stockpile it put together after SARS1, because it expired before another pandemic happened.

At the federal and provincial levels.

And no, they didn’t replace the stock.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/03/25/p...

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081

Our stockpile wasn't maintained and replenished either. I don't think anyone got in trouble for that failure, but I hope they did and I just didn't hear about it.

Of course nobody got in trouble for that. They were rewarded handsomely.

So, did you know there are no manufacturers in the US that can produce N95 at scale? Even now many masks still come from china and Asia. There was an article about one company in the US that has ceased manufacturing because the hospitals who purchased from them in prior pandemics (eg: h1n1) promised to keep buying but the hospitals fell to cost cutting and moved purchasing back to china.

In these circumstances capitalism directs us to the cheapest solution. Not the most robust solution. The solution is basically government as a guaranteed buyer. Yet this factory never had that and went out of business and even in Covid times didn’t come back afaik.

Finally remember that mask-nationalism was popping up in 2020. China was restricting exports of masks and so was the U.S. and Europe. The difficulty of acquiring masks was not to be underestimated. There were additional sordid details of government sponsored programs being used to personally enrich certain (relatives of potus) people.

And during the alpha strain of Covid it turns out the relatively low infectiveness combined with droplet control via cloth masks actually did the trick and reduced spread. Pediatric flu deaths went from ~150 to 1 in the 2020 season. One! All thanks to distancing and masks. We literally made a strain of the flu extinct via masks.

You can just hand wave away anything with 'at scale'.

https://news.3m.com/3M-Aberdeen-workers-make-1-billion-N95s-...

I guess 95 million a month isn't enough for everyone in the country to put a new one on weekly, but it probably covers a significant portion of institutional need.

If the government quietly convinced all major retailers to stop selling masks that would’ve been 10000x more detrimental than the mixed messaging early on.

If someone could produce even one document implying that this was discussed at all it would’ve been catastrophic.

It would have had worse short term political consequences because it would have been an unpopular decision. But it wouldn’t have reinforced the worldview of conspiracy theorists.

They screwed up a bunch of things during COVID, but not many really trustworthy organizations actually just straight-up lied. Having something concrete to point to can’t help.

I don't think it would have even been unpopular. Most people understand that the masks needed to go to first responders.

My fairly anodyne conspiracy theory is that the government actually just missed the ball completely — didn’t want to admit it was going to be a big deal, etc, so they gave the “masks not necessary” advice. Then as the narrative was developing it became less embarrassing to appear manipulative than wrong and so here we are.

If they really wanted to save PPE for the hospitals, they could have made some calls to Walmart, Home Depot, and friends to pull it from the shelves. If it were an attempt at manipulation it would have been executed more smoothly.

> If someone could produce even one document implying that this was discussed at all it would’ve been catastrophic.

Why? that sounds like a pretty reasonable measure to me. The government has every right to ask companies to limit supply or pull stock off shelves in a crisis. Hell, it could force them to if needed and bring back rationing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States

The better question is: Knowing we've had a respiratory pandemic in the recent past, and knowing another would happen eventually, why were we so unprepared? And who - naming names - is responsible for that?

Why isn't this being asked and discussed?

No doubt! Even if the CDC hadn't lied they'd still have a lot to answer for.

My understanding is that N95 masks have a shelf life (2-5 years?), so stock would need to be regularly repurchased.

The bigger issue is the sheer cost of preparation against an exponentially-reproducing threat.

All other disasters can be prepared for with state of the art gear because they are, by nature, limited. Ergo, a limit amount of gear can be rapidly transported to location and will suffice.

In contrast, a pandemic requires "multiple for every single person" levels of stock. Which is outside most capitalist supply bounds (i.e. no one can even produce that much stock).

Just do stock rotation. Bring stock in, release old stock to hospitals and such where it will be used right away.

Think in quantities. Hospitals in normal times don't consume the number of masks you'd need to stockpile for a pandemic situation.

Possibly. But either stockpile or product them locally so production can be ramped up for local populous in the time of a pandemic. And make sending masks overseas illegal.

Too many people were buying up shops of marks and sending them back to China. That hurts us even more.

A ton of masks used in the US were assembled in China, because they have the manufacturing capacity and labor cost advantage, even if they were built with meltblown filters produced in the US.

If the goal is pandemic preparedness, it would probably be most efficient to just build and mothball production lines, doing limited runs yearly to exercise the machinery.

The government has more than enough land and warehouse space.

As far as I understand, none of the components (or machinery to produce them) are particularly cutting edge... just limited because they were sized for pre-pandemic sales volume.

At least where I am (Canada) hospitals all buy through a couple of “buying groups”, so it’s not a bad way to get rid of lots of stock quickly.

N95s are used in many industries, and it’s a liquid market. Not hard to call up a big industrial distributor and say “hey, we have these masks that expire in 1yr, want to have a sale?”

We can invent and manufactur a bomber that evades radar. Mask are 5 to 10 orders of magnitude less involved.

The only responsible excuse is incompetence or negligence. We, the USA, were completely unprepared.

incompetence AND negligence

> My understanding is that N95 masks have a shelf life (2-5 years?), so stock would need to be regularly repurchased.

“Shelf-life” on non-perishable goods is highly conservative and often regulated by profit motive. Millions of N95 and P95 respirators were destroyed shortly before the pandemic due to “shelf life” and yet would have been a god send compared to having nothing or treating active COVID cases with a t-shirt or bandana over your face as happened in many US hospitals.

Proper planning could have rotated stock to maintain shelf life, slightly less proper planning could have realized the sheer stupidity of destroying working strategic materials due to an arbitrary and made up number.

We regularly enrich The MIC with over-budget weapons, certainly we can figure out how to manufacture N95 masks and rotate them as necessary.

This is Respiratory Pandemic 101. It's a threshold no expert should be tolerant of and/or should fail. Any other excuse is propaganda.

> They simply messed up.

It's amazing how quickly human fallibility is forgotten when the motivations align with ideologically.

The achilles heel of every conspiracy is the idea that everything that happens is 100% planned and intended.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com