The Grifters, Chapter 2 - N95 Masks
Epsilon Theory
August 11, 2020·10 comments·Politics
The federal government claims N95 masks are being produced at scale and distributed through proper channels. Major cities report improving stockpiles. Yet in small towns and rural counties, healthcare workers are rationing masks, buying surgical masks at Staples, and dying without protection. The contradiction isn't about production capacity. It's about a distribution system designed to reward political allies and corporate behemoths while leaving everyone else on their own.
- The domestic N95 supply exists but is functionally invisible. American manufacturers produce tens of millions of masks monthly, yet someone spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to procure them directly cannot locate a single legitimate batch. The masks are being hoarded by private resellers, government stockpiles, or sold to other countries.
- The federal stockpile only works for big hospital systems in big cities. When New York Presbyterian needs masks, there's a process: governor contacts vice president, vice president calls FEMA, requisition forms flow through proper channels, truckloads arrive. Outside major metropolitan areas, that pipeline doesn't exist.
- Rural and small-town healthcare has become a Hobbesian state of nature. Towns like Dothan, Alabama and Harlingen, Texas have no requisition departments, no coordination with federal supplies, no leverage with private distributors. A volunteer EMT buying masks with his own money and waiting six weeks for reimbursement is how the system works for them.
- Playing ball with the White House determined who got contracts and who faced threats. Companies that allowed campaign photo ops and provided quotable talking points received contracts and favorable treatment. Companies that prioritized their own supply chains faced Twitter attacks and Defense Production Act invocations that hurt their stock price.
- The entire system treats a pandemic emergency as a grift opportunity. Masks meant for medical use were sold to other countries. Contracts were awarded to politically connected companies regardless of capacity. The point was never to solve the problem. It was to generate talking points and extract value.
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Comments
“let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at the king’s mess:”
Hamlet
Perfect. Just retweeted this.
Oh Ben. It’s all so utterly depressing. Similar situation here in the UK with government contracts being handed out to cronies hand over fist, and hundreds of millions of taxpayers money being spaffed up the wall. Jo Maugham, QC, is trying his best via The Good Law Project (https://goodlawproject.org/news/the-ppe-fiasco/) to hold the government to account, but the absolute unashamed brazeness of their behaviour beggars belief. Johnson has definitely been studying the Trump playbook.
My biggest issue with all of this isn’t even the corruption and graft that’s happening now, it’s what happens in the future as we see this kind of behavior normalized. I’m in the nice suburbs of a hilariously corrupt city, and it’s simply always been understood that the leaders would attempt to enrich themselves. Nobody here is fazed by it. And the city has suffered for decades because of it. Extrapolating that attitude out on a national scale is terrifying to me.
A friend of a friend works at one of those hospitals in flyover country, not high on the distribution priority list for PPE. Things are getting better… At least 100% better! When this whole mess started, the hospital started rationing N95 masks: one per employee, to be stored in a plastic box when not in use. Employees are now issued two N95 masks and two boxes: one to use when seeing patients known to have COVID-19 and one for seeing other patients.
Ben
How I love that thing you do.
Thank you Ben. This negligence is overwhelming in its simplicity, there is no complicated reason the mask “market” is not functioning, no difficult knot to unravel. The entire “game” of economies and life has always been somewhat uneven in its rules but never have I despaired so completely in the idea that economic opportunity for all is dead and in its place is a system run and rigged by those who have already won. On a more angry note, the Guillotine was invented at a time when people realized the fix was in…
It’s hard to imagine, right? That it’s come to this?
" flashing his America First salute."
I see what you did there . . . .
I wanna believe “you know… You and me”. But God damn, the stupidity of seemingly highly intelligent people who can’t see the shit that’s going on. It’s just too easy for people to be lazy.
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