Facebook donates emergency reserve of 720k masks

It's not like they had plans to sell them for price gouging purposes nor did they purchase them immediately ahead of a crisis and create/contribute to a shortage or anything anti-social like that.

For durable emergency supplies like masks. all of us should, if we're able, be maintaining a supply outside of emergency times to help buffer demand shocks at times of need.

It makes sense. If it weren't for Facebook not having this reserve we would just be 720k short. It's not like the companies selling these would just hold inventory, especially since if you store them too long the elastic and the seal becomes weak across a large enough sample.

> Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable—and in some respects is becoming quickly more so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even key items are made to order. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-th...

^ this is our current system. The people that would have been responsible for activating production had been fired. The CDC bungled the first tests. The FDA prevented anybody but the CDC from performing tests until just recently. The FDA tried to stop the Seattle Flu Study from back testing their samples to find evidence of infections; the scientists defied the FDA and found early evidence that would not have been found earlier.

Here's Trump responding to a reporter asking about the risks of firing the pandemic response team, back in 2018:

https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/123992026897964646...

He later denied any knowledge of doing this. And instead of hiring back the people, he called the virus a Democrat hoax. Only later did he even pay attention to it, but there are debates about whether the VP he said was in charge, or his son-in-law is actually in charge. Nobody knows what is going on, every press conference is filled with basic inaccuracies, and he ignores the science. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explain...

It's rotten from the top. We have robbed our government from essential functions, not to really save any money, but because we have an executive that doesn't know what he is doing and is too narcissistic to let anybody stick around that might reveal his inferiority complex.

Politicians that know better keep silent for fear of angering this president.

This is not a partisan statement, this is a statement of the fundamental distinction of having a bad leader. No corporation would survive like this. For the federal government, which is several orders of magnitude more complex than any corporation, we are absolutely devastated by having such terrible executive leadership.

People need to start speaking up and realizing that we must drop the partisanship in order for our country to remain a leader in science and economic power.

It took climate scientistS more than a decade to realize that being apolitical meant that the science would be politicized by monied interests; anybody who is interested in truth and science should realize that we must now mobilize against a political force with so large a lust for power that it will acknowledge no external authority, no truth, no empirical reality. These are strange times.

It is important to understand hospitals and doctors could not legally use industrial N95 masks. No hospital could accept them without exposing themselves to massive litigation. I know this sounds stupid from outside the US. Sadly, this is part of our reality.

The key that unlocked donations was President Trump. Upon learning of this restriction he quickly put into place a release of liability for medical use of industrial N95 masks. This will be in force until at least 2024.

Because of this companies, contractors, suppliers and individuals came forward to donate masks. Apple donated a couple million units. I believe this might easily unlock tens of millions of masks as companies evaluate their inventories and continue to donate.

Commentary:

It is important to realize that the US healthcare system does not have an insurance problem. Politicians would have you think this is the case. It is not. The root cause of our high cost of healthcare, among other things, has to do with the underlying and hidden costs of doing business. This issue of masks is a simple example.

Hospitals, medical professionals and medical suppliers live in fear of greedy attorneys going after them for anything from masks to more complex equipment. This leads to major losses and costs and even legislation. And all of it increases the costs of doing business.

After this virus runs its course we would be well served to review a number of things, tort reform being a good idea. The other would be term limits for the House and Senate, I think it is beyond obvious these institutions have gone putrid to the very core.

It might also be rather strange to those outside the US to learn that in this wonderful country doctors and nurses cannot legally provide their services outside of the State where they are licensed. A doctor or nurse licensed in California cannot see patients in, say, Maine. In other words, we are not a country, we are a group of fenced-off kingdoms with some of the most ridiculous rules one could possibly imagine.

Our doctors can travel to Africa and practice medicine, yet they can't go to another State and do the same. How ridiculous is this?

That's just another element of our system that has to change. There's more, a lot more. The onerous and massively expensive drug or medical device approval process is another example.

Insurance is the last item in a very long list of issues we must address in order to bring sanity to our healthcare system.