Fauci and the SG did mislead the public, and Fauci implicitly admitted just prior to the April 3rd announcement to wear improvised masks that the driving factor of his decision was a shortage of PPE for medical workers and fear of panic buying.

The problem here is, from both a public official and a medical professional standpoint, that it represents conduct unbecoming - you do not lie about the potential efficacy of an intervention to mitigate risk, period. It doesn't matter if he felt the reasons were noble. That destroys the public trust.

As a firefighter I often work closely with our EMA, and when doing contingency planning panic buying is a known variable that can be accounted for. So the idea that people might panic buy should have been irrelevant. The public often assumes the Government is like the special forces of management: lean, efficient and on top of things. After all, we spend billions on emergency management organizations from homeland security, CDC, FEMA, all the way down the line, whose actual day job is preparing for various eventualities.

Yet it takes a pandemic to discover our strategic national stockpile was woefully inadequate to address any sort of surge, and to discover our domestic production capability has also degraded, such that we rely upon overseas sources and "just in time" logistics for mission critical items like PPE. That's not a simple oversight, that's a national security risk, it should never have been a thing. It's like finding out something like 80% of the entire world's IV supplies come from a single facility in Puerto Rico only AFTER a hurricane knocks it out.


We had on the order of 119 million N95 masks in the strategic national stockpile in 2009 prior to the H1N1 pandemic, which was never fully restocked. Even if it had been, it's well short of what one of HHS Secretary Alex Azar's deputies testified we would actually need to address shortfalls during a nationwide pandemic of this scale: 3.5 billion. These would last on the order of a few weeks at national scale and is only supposed to be a stopgap while domestic production is ramped up. At ~$2.50/kg in material costs (pre pandemic) that would amount to a mere $200 million, and widespread availability of N95 level masks would allow those who want to wear them to do so while greatly ameliorating the issues of others refusing to, since source control oriented masks (cloth / surgical masks) tend to only work effectively if everyone is wearing them.

Unfortunately, NIOSH approved N95 masks are still not widely available a year into this, though they do pop up from time to time, Amazon still refuses to sell to ordinary individuals and they have to make due with alternatives, with other sources (like Ebay) sometimes selling fake masks.

I do have access to them thanks to work, but I do hope this sort of thing is rectified in the future and never happens again. I will certainly be incorporating lessons learned and purchasing more when available. Reusable half or full face respirators make a lot of sense given the duration involved in a pandemic of this scale (1-2 years of wearing every day)