In an excerpt from his book Pandemic, Inc., J. David McSwane details how greedy capitalists took advantage of a discombobulated government during the height of Covid-19
through the exit of the private wing of Dulles International Airport, a glinting Legacy 450 Flexjet whirring ahead of us on the tarmac. He turned to offer a caveat.It was the morning of Saturday, April 26, 2020 — the year a plague upended our world and I fell into the absurd realm of those trying to profit from the despair. Stewart was sturdy, early thirties, filling out a tailored and shiny gray suit.
His was one of the biggest contracts the federal government had awarded in early 2020, when the Trump administration finally opened the financial spigot to address a politically inconvenient pandemic. Every state, local, and federal agency and hospital was locked in fierce competition to buy masks, driving up prices. Extreme demand, scarce supply, and an inept federal government were congealing into a colossal “shit show,” as one supply chain expert described it to me.
The federal government and Congress had failed to shore up the national stockpile. What supplies were in the stockpile were already depleted. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo had decried on television the Wild West market that had emerged in the absence of federal preparation and response. He compared fighting against other states and cities for precious masks and ventilators to entering into a bidding war on eBay.
These weren’t just any masks to which Stewart claimed to have access. They were the gold-standard N95 respirators manufactured by 3M, the vaunted American company that brought us Scotch tape and the Post-it note. Capable of filtering out 95 percent of particles, the N95mask, most associated with dusty DIY home repair jobs, had become an unexpected ticket to riches — if you could find a cache of them and sell to the highest bidder.
He said he didn’t know how, but he was going to deliver 6 million N95s and meet his deadline, Sunday at midnight. He’d been working the phones all night and had a promising lead on an investor who could secure the masks, for a fee. The deal involved “the attorney general of Alabama,” he said, and one way or another he was going to deliver. Faith had gotten him this far. Besides, look at the jet. Surely this was someone who meant business.
I wish I could have told that story, but no, this story is something worse. What began as journalistic curiosity about supply shortages and a quest to find answers for Americans who were dying or trapped in nursing homes and apartments would morph into a nearly two-year examination of America’s underlying conditions. This is the story of the bad guys of the Covid-19 era. It is the story of us.
Efforts to stop the spread of the virus by closing nonessential businesses were undermined by entrenched capitalist interests and division-stoking politicians and the fringes to which they are captive. In Texas and elsewhere, the sentiment that it was better to keep commerce going, even during the most terrifying months, even if it threatened American lives, was an acceptable trade-off.
For all their promise and salvation, the vaccines themselves were undermined by the preexisting and profitable machinery of misinformation. Those who had mastered the craft of profiting from medical quackery and lies sprang to action, spreading fear about vaccines while promoting disproven or dubious treatments they packaged and sold to the detriment of the American people.
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