AN EXAMPLE OF HOW THE US HAS MIS-HANDLED A NATIONAL PANDEMIC
…Dr. Rick Bright, Director of the Biomedical
Advanced Research and Development Authority, or “BARDA”
Well before the Coronavirus attack, the US had allowed 90%
of US medical supply production to leave the country.
The following story will demonstrate why the
current administration under President Trump is not qualified to manage the
nation through dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic:
Over twenty years ago, in the 1990’s, Mr.
Michael Bowen was a new product specialist at a plant called Tecnol Medical
Products in Texas. The plant was
part of a supply operation that produced 9 of 10 medical and surgical
masks used in the United States.
But also in the 1990's, many US companies were involved in industry consolidations and outsourcing was beginning to shift control of the medical mask plant from Tecnol Medical
Products to Kimberly-Clark. And some time after that, the plant was shut down altogether.
According to government reports, in less than a
decade, 90% of all US medical supply production had moved out of the country.
Then, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, Congress appropriated $6 billion to buy antidotes to
bioweapons and the medical supplies the country would need in public health
disasters. An obscure new government
organization called the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development
Authority, or BARDA was formed.
This operation was among the agencies purchasing material for what would
become known as the Strategic National Stockpile.
Bowen and a Mr. Dan Reese, a former executive at Tecnol, went
into business together in 2005 and bought the plant that they
re-named: Prestige Ameritech. They believed at the time that a market remained for a
dedicated domestic manufacturer of protective medical gear.
Within BARDA, Bowen was looking
for a real contract person. The government had said they would pay a premium to have masks manufactured
domestically, so Bowen’s company decided to keep its extra factory lines in working
order, meaning production could be ramped up in an emergency.
Bowen said he soon concluded that unfortunately, BARDA’s
focus was directed elsewhere, on billion-dollar deals to induce manufacturing
of vaccines for the most exotic disasters, such as weaponized attacks with
anthrax or smallpox. Still, as Bowen moved down the supply chain,
appealing directly to hospitals to buy his domestic-made masks, his sales pitch
often ended with a plea for potential customers to call BARDA and
suggest they contact Bowen's company for domestic manufactured masks.
As a sales tool, Bowen also often carried with him, a 2007 PowerPoint
presentation from BARDA and from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. One slide in the presentation had a table showing that, in the
event of a pandemic, the country would need 5.3 billion N95 masks, 50
times more than the number in the national stockpile. The presentation concluded: “Industrial
surge capacity of [respiratory protection devices] will not be able to meet
need and supplies will be short during a pandemic.”
Bowen said he felt like a voice in the
wilderness. He said, “The world just looked at me as a medical mask
salesman who was like, ‘chicken-little, saying the sky was falling’, and
the customers would say, ‘Your competitors aren’t saying that in China.’ ”
But after Trump’s election, Bowen had hoped the new
president’s ‘America-First’ mentality might trickle down to operations
like his. He wrote a letter to Trump and addressed it to 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue: “90% of the United States protective mask supply is currently
FOREIGN MADE!” it began. “I
didn’t think Trump would read it, but I thought someone would and possibly take note,”
Bowen said.
Bowen also called Dr. Rick Bright, who had been
appointed to lead BARDA just before Trump took office. “In 14
years of doing this, there have been maybe four people in government who I felt
like really understood this issue,” Bowen said. “Rick was one of them.”
In Trump’s first year, Bowen grew very disillusioned. During a week when the White House touted its “Buy
American, Hire American” initiative, Bowen had lost a military contract
worth up to $1 million to a supplier that would make the masks in
Mexico.
“Shame on the Department of Defense! One of
these days the US military will need America’s manufacturers to help win
another war or fight another pandemic — and they will not exist,” Bowen
wrote on Aug. 17, 2017, to Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Clark, a senior official with the
Pentagon’s Defense Health Agency.
Clark, who retired last year, did not respond
to a recent message seeking his comment.
Factory equipment that could produce a
quarter-million N95 respirator masks a day sat idle at Prestige Ameritech’s
factory outside Fort Worth. As expected, their proposal to produce in the US
went nowhere
For Bowen, the first signs of trouble came just this January.
Bowen’s online orders through his company’s
website, had typically, up until then, totaled approximately $2,000 a year. It only accounted for a fraction of his
business. But suddenly it skyrocketed to
almost $700,000 in just a few days.
On Jan. 20, Bowen also fielded a call from the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS), urgently seeking thousands of masks for US airport
screeners. Bowen said he did not have
enough masks in stock to fill the order, but the call led him to contact Dr.
Bright to tell him about the surge in demand for masks. “Is this virus going
to be problematic?” Bowen wrote.
Inside HHS, Bright quickly passed
Bowen’s on-the-ground observations to a group that included Laura Wolf, the
director of the HHS agency’s Division of Critical Infrastructure
Protection.
“Can you please reach out to Mike Bowen at
Prestige Ameritech? He is a great partner and a really good source for helpful
information,” Bright wrote on Jan. 21.
“Thanks Rick,” she replied. “We are
tracking and have begun to coordinate with the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety (NIOSH) and all the medical manufacturers today. More to
follow tomorrow. Thinking about masks, gowns (inc those in shortage), gloves,
and eye protection.”
Within a day, Bowen sent an email to Ms. Wolf, laying out what Prestige could do. “The company’s four mothballed
manufacturing lines could be restarted with large non-cancelable orders. This is NOT something we would ever wish
to do and have NO plans to do it on our own,” he wrote. “I’m simply
letting you know that in a dire situation, it could be done.”
Over the next three days, Bowen kept HHS
officials informed as orders for a million masks came in from buyers in China and Hong Kong. On
Jan. 26, he sent the email warning that the US mask supply was at “imminent
risk.”
Bright
forwarded it that day to Dr. Robert Kadlec the Assistant Secretary
for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) and others, urging action: “We
have been watching and receiving warnings on this for weeks,” he
wrote.
The next day, Bright wrote to his deputy asking
him to explore whether BARDA could divert money earmarked for
vaccines and other bio-defense measures to instead buy masks.
From his end, Bowen said his proposal to divert funding seemed to
be going nowhere. “No one at HHS ever did get back to me,” Bowen said.
Bowen started talking to reporters about the
mask shortage in general terms. He was soon invited to appear on former Trump
adviser, Stephen Bannon’s podcast: “War Room: Pandemic.”
On that Feb. 12 podcast, the two
commiserated over the beleaguered state of US manufacturing. “What I’ve been
saying since 2007 is, ‘Guys, I’m warning you, here’s what is going to
happen, let’s prepare,’ ” Bowen said on the program. “Because if you
call me after it starts, I can’t help everybody.”
Bowen said Bannon then put him in touch with
Dr. Peter Navarro, the Director of the Office of Trade and
Manufacturing Policy (OTMP), he was also the White House economic
adviser.
Dr. Navarro was quick to see the problem, Bowen
said. After talking with Bowen, he wrote
to Bright that he should soon expect a call from the White House. “I’m
pretty sure that my mask supply message will be heard by President Trump this
week,” Bowen wrote. “Trump insider reading yesterday’s Wired.com
article, the ball is screaming toward your court.”
According to Bright, he soon began
attending White House meetings and was helping Dr. Navarro write memos
describing the supply of masks as a top issue. Emails and memos show Bright reporting back to Kadlec and others about his work with
Dr. Navarro.
Unfortunately, still, nothing happened and none
of this turned the tide for Bowen and his company
Nearly a month after his e-mailed offer, Bowen
received his first formal communication about possibly helping to bolster the
US supply. The five-page form letter from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA),
the one Bowen said he suspected was also sent to many other manufacturers. He then asked how his company could help with
what was by then a “national emergency response” to the shortage of protective
gear.
Bowen, then on Feb. 16, fired off a terse email
to FDA and HHS officials. He directed the agencies to a US government
website listing approved foreign manufacturers of medical masks. “There
you’ll find a long list of approved Chinese respirator mask companies,” he
wrote. “Please send your long list of questions to them.”
In March, Bowen submitted a bid to supply masks
to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which by then
had taken over medical supply purchasing.
The government soon spent over
$600 million on contracts involving masks. Big companies like Honeywell
and 3M were each awarded contracts totaling over
$170 million for protective gear. One distributor of tactical gear (a
company with no history of procuring medical equipment ) was still awarded a
$55 million deal to provide masks for as much as $5.50 each. That is eight times what the government was
paying just months earlier.
On April 7, FEMA finally awarded Bowen's Prestige
Ameritech a $9.5 million contract to provide a million N95 masks a
month for one year, an order the company could fulfill without activating its still dormant manufacturing lines. For those masks, Prestige only charged the US government, 79 cents apiece.
The aforementioned information is the story
from a US company that had warned Trump's White House back in 2017 that the US
was not prepared to deal with a medical pandemic, especially if vast amounts of medical
supplies and equipment were required, as they are today. It wasn’t until the pandemic had been going
for months that this American manufacturer was recognized with a purchase order
for American made masks and medical supplies.
And the US manufacturer wasn’t charging as others did, 5 times the normal
price for the emergency needs in the nation, of masks and other medical supplies.
Please note that in addition, the Trump administration had early on disbanded the organization within the NSA that the Obama administration had developed for dealing with a possible pandemic.
Copyright G. Ater 2020
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