The administration is struggling to clearly communicate what type of masks people should be wearing amid a surge of omicron cases.
Higher-quality masks increase the time it could take for Covid to spread between people.
During the early days of the pandemic, people in the U.S. were urged to leave N95 masks and the KN95 versions made in China for health care workers. But since then, the U.S. has bolstered its manufacturing capacity, and the country now has a stockpile of 750 million N95 masks as part of the Strategic National Stockpile for health care workers.The White House official said Wednesday that the distribution of 400 million masks would be the largest deployment of personal protective equipment in U.S.
to shift the burden away from U.S. households. The N95 masks can sell for as little as $1 and be reused several times, but they can add up to be more expensive than reusable cloth masks over time. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., joined Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and other Democrats last week to push for a bill that would provide three N95 masks to every person living in the U.S., while a group of medical experts who advised Biden during the transition publicly encouraged the White House last week to give people vouchers to buy masks from retailers.
Inglesby said that the administration was"absolutely preparing for the possibility of additional variants in the future" and that people could expect the government to make N95 masks"more and more available."Heidi Przybyla is an NBC News correspondent.
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