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Obama Admin Started Program For Rapid Mask Production; Republicans Shelved it in 2018
A new machine designed to churn out millions of masks at high speed during a pandemic was green-lit by the Obama administration.
In September 2018, the Trump administration received detailed plans for a new machine designed to churn out millions of protective respirator masks at high speed during a pandemic.
The plans, submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by the medical manufacturer O&M Halyard, were the culmination of a venture unveiled almost three years earlier by the Obama administration.
But HHS did not proceed with making the machine.
In 2018 the Trump administration received a detailed plan on the initiative. It went nowhere.
Halyard said Thursday in a statement that its work on the government contract was completed in September 2018. An HHS spokesperson, who declined to speak for attribution, told The Washington Post that although Halyard’s plans were feasible, no funding was available to build the machine.
“The Halyard contract was part of an explicit strategy to ensure we could surge mask production in the next crisis,” said Nicole Lurie, who was the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response under Obama. “Now we’re dealing with the consequences of not having that capability.”
This was incredibly well thought out. Masks on a shelf expire. So the government needs to control rapid machines that can make them immediately when needed. Then Republicans under Trump refused to fund it.
Officials had long assumed that a public health emergency would one day create a huge demand for the respirator masks known as N95s. But the difficulty of predicting when a pandemic or other crisis would strike meant stockpiled masks could pass their expiration dates while sitting on shelves. Halyard said its new machine would provide a just-in-time inventory alternative and avoid waste by enabling rapid and plentiful production when a crisis hit.
“Pandemic preparedness in the United States is imperative to protecting health and saving lives, and respirator manufacturing capacity remains a critical gap in that preparedness,” Robin Robinson, then the director of BARDA, said in a statement at the time.
HHS officials said in a strategy document that they hoped the machine would produce at least 1.5 million masks per day....
Republicans literally killing us because they think government is evil. Their actions make government evil because they destroy it from the inside.