The National shortage of N95 respirator masks was traced back to 2009 after the H1N1 swine flu pandemic when the Obama administration, after being advised to refill it’s stock did not.
Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times dropped the news over the weekend, the Trump administration is now scrambling to replenish the stockpile that the Obama administration depleted.
In 2009, the H1N1 outbreak hit the United States and it lead to 274,304 hospitalization, 12,469 deaths, and it wiped out the nation’s stockpile of N95 respirator masks.
According to the Los Angeles Times a federally backed task force and safety equipment organization recommended to the Obama administration that the masks needed to be replenished because they used all 100 million masks for the H1N1 outbreak.
Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Association, said that advice was never followed.
“Our association is unaware of any major effort to restore the stockpile to cover that drawdown,” he said.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar reported last month that only 12 million N95 were available in the stockpile, “a tiny fraction of the 3.5 billion masks one of Azar’s deputies later testified the nation’s healthcare system would need,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
Bloomberg News also found similar findings stating, “after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”
The President asked construction companies to “donate their inventory of N95 masks to your local hospital and forgo additional orders of those industrial masks” and the Defense Department is also providing 5 million N95 masks, as well as 2,000 ventilators.
As of Monday John Hopkins University is tracking 372,563 cases of coronavirus worldwide that has resulted in 16,381 deaths. The United States has 41,708 confirmed cases and 573 deaths as a result of the virus, most deaths are occurring in New York City and Washington State.
Washington Examiner | Los Angeles Times | Bloomberg News
