When the coronavirus hit the U.S., countless Americans were left unprotected amid a desperate shortage of PPE. There still isn’t enough. WATCH JulietLinderman and MendozaMartha on frontlinepbs Tuesday night at 10 ET, or stream now here:
The Associated Press and “FRONTLINE” launched a seven-month investigation -- filing Freedom of Information Act requests, testing medical masks, interviewing dozens of experts from hard-hit hospitals to the White House -- to understand what was behind these critical shortages.
The lack of early testing was a major stumble. First, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tests were faulty. Then there weren’t enough. The Food and Drug Administration raced to approve more tests, but without access to cheap, disposable swabs -- made almost entirely in Italy and now in very short supply -- they were useless. U.S. public health departments’ worst fears were quickly realized.
“And these are unacceptable deaths, each of which could have been prevented if we had had adequate supply chains in place in advance of the pandemic,” said UC Berkeley Professor William Dow. He went to the White House and told President George W. Bush, who rolled out at $7.1 billion pandemic preparedness plan. Leavitt, a Republican, spent the next three years traveling to all 50 states, warning health officials to get ready by stockpiling six to eight weeks of masks, gloves and other supplies.
The AP and “FRONTLINE” spoke with members of the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations who were responsible for pandemic preparedness. All said they had worried and warned about inadequate supply chains. But solutions were expensive, and neither Congress nor the White House made this a priority.
“There was not a lot of traction on the part of most of the people participating,” Lurie said. “One didn’t have the sense coming in that this was going to be high on the priority list.” “So many thousands of people have died needlessly, and it didn’t need to be this way,” she said. “But I think if I reflect on what’s going on here, this is an administration that had policies, procedures, tools, plans, checklists, advance warning, all of those things, and it appears to have used almost none of it.”
The story of their company, Prestige Ameritech, explains why the U.S. has failed to maintain a robust domestic medical supply manufacturing base. In 2014, a confidential presentation obtained by the AP and “FRONTLINE” from HHS warned that the U.S. supply of medical masks was “nearly exhausted” and that 5.3 billion would be needed in a pandemic.
“I felt that the government was intentionally misleading the people because they had not prepared as they should have, and the products are not available,” said Reese. Experts agree that one solution is a massive investment in U.S. manufacturing that not only allows existing companies to expand, but guarantees a long-term market for medical supplies that are more expensive than those made by Asian competitors. There is no sign that this is going to happen.
“At some point I had the thought, how is it that we can’t get more? Like, why? Why?” he said. “In life, when you run out, you just get more.” It would be many weeks before China’s exports resumed. Meanwhile, the U.S. needed billions of N95 masks that simply weren’t available. President Donald Trump initially rebuffed calls from states, medical workers, Congressional Democrats and domestic manufacturers to invoke the Defense Production Act, which allows the federal government to boost manufacturing. He said it wasn’t necessary, but then abruptly reversed course in the spring, giving a few U.S. factories support they needed to expand production of N95s and the raw materials used to make them.
“We cannot forget the lesson, the key lesson, which is we need to bring our pharma home and our equipment home,” Navarro told AP and “FRONTLINE.” Heading into winter, the government now needs hundreds of millions of needles and syringes to vaccinate the nation, items Navarro warned earlier this year were in short supply.
How Sandra Oldfield, the Fresno nurse, came to be a dot on that graph can be debated. Kaiser Permanente says it has followed state and federal guidelines and is “prudently managing PPE supplies.”
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