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Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

> “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks?

I don't why the mainstream media isn't focusing more on this angle. Five years ago the richest, most powerful, country in the world couldn't get basic medical supplies to its citizens during a public health crisis. That should have terrified us into making major policy changes, but instead everyone just seems to have shrugged it off and gone back to business as usual.

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The US can barely get basic medical supplies to much of its population outside of a health crisis - not because of direct supply chain issues, but because the system is designed to put corporate profits over adequate service provision.

And in the not so general case, over national security.

Is manufacturing the real problem here? Or is it a symptom of decades of systemic mismanagement of opportunity by a culture that values short-sighted opportunism over strategy?

Way to misdirect a totally valid point

How, it’s the elephant in the room.

These cherry-picking arguments are a huge problem and we need to acknowledge that they are. So, we focus on one problem and ignore all the benefits that helped us in that time? The world-wide effort to understand the disease and rapidly develop a vaccine? The world-wide talent pool that feeds our hospitals and clinics? The supply chain that did kick in to fill the holes eventually? An economy that always 'makes its own masks' is not going to be able to do everything because everything is simply too much, even for the mighty US of A. It is easy to point at one thing that didn't go well and ignore the reality that the world that would have gotten that one thing right would have gotten so many other things terribly wrong.

Well China made its own masks and also managed a staff a fully operational medical system and pharmaceutical industry ad the same time. So clearly a single country can do all of this. Furthermore I think most countries would look at how China managed the pandemic and be impressed by the results. The masks are not a singular item. They generalize to a whole slew of critical components that a functioning society needs like pharmaceuticals (and their precursors), or half the global electronics supply chain. These resources exist in a time of peace but in a crunch they will disappear.

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