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The article headline makes it seem like the factories couldn't make the gloves. But further down it says that the cost was double and factories couldn't get buyers. These are very different failure modes, and speak to very different solutions.
One sounds incapable from a skill perspective, the other is incapable from a market perspective. I’ll take the later over the former any day.
The article headline makes it seem like the factories couldn't make the gloves. But further down it says that the cost was double and factories couldn't get buyers. These are very different failure modes, and speak to very different solutions.
That might have been a bargain if you could have done it during peak Covid. Having the capability to make them is worth a lot in resilience.
A very important question to ask. Should the US make medical gloves?
The more important part is how to make people who ask this question a permanent pariahs?
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That might have been a bargain if you could have done it during peak Covid. Having the capability to make them is worth a lot in resilience.
Or stockpile a two year supply. You can get a lot with a billion dollars.
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One sounds incapable from a skill perspective, the other is incapable from a market perspective. I’ll take the later over the former any day.
The later form was part of the design from the beginning: relying on imports for something this critical in times of an epidemic was a supply chain risk. It was never intended to compete in terms of pricing. It baffles me that this wasn’t made more explicit? That seems to be the root cause of the failure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might have been a bargain if you could have done it during peak Covid. Having the capability to make them is worth a lot in resilience.
Or stockpile a two year supply. You can get a lot with a billion dollars.
But a year before COVID, these warehouses were shut down, as the stockpiles were old, and needed a refresh, and politicians didnt see the need to spend tens of millions on new stockpiles.
The has happened several times over the last 100 years.
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You gotta optimize everything for the market man! It's magic! Everything will work out if we only make number go up! Who cares about silly stuff like health emergencies, the climate catastrophe or war. Number must go up!
You don't need to optimise for the market. The market is the optimising machine. Get in its way with slow regulators or subsidies or bailouts and you get all the problems.
Markets will make you climb a hill ignoring it ends on a cliff end
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Or stockpile a two year supply. You can get a lot with a billion dollars.
These things expire you know, for latex gloves it's only 3 years.
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That might have been a bargain if you could have done it during peak Covid. Having the capability to make them is worth a lot in resilience.
Who’s paying to bring online a factory that sites idle just in case? Are you also paying workers to sit there idle?