This is a red herring issue. The problem isn’t that Chinese won’t sell the US masks. It’s that the US is trying to buy too many too late. We could have spent the past decade stockpiling them.
American protectionism is actually part of what created this problem: it was only this week that the Chinese KN95 standard was approved for use by the FDA.
Ironically USA Today ran a piece (not opinion) about the Obama administration using the strategic stockpile for various things during his tenure, but never refilling it.
Here, Congress is more to blame than the Obama Administration, who clearly wanted more money for this. Congress budgeted far too little money, and the administration rightly prioritized medication over masks.[1]
yeah I see the rationale for it being that they were developing a new mask type that would be comfortable and reusable that they could stock up on. they didn't think that the entire global infrastructure would be so overwhelmed that they couldn't procure them in time. turns out they should have known to keep a reserve of them(100m was the number they would have stocked, though 300m is needed for this particular pandemic) now obama's team didn't hoard enough indeed and he deserves a bit of blame but it's also 3 years into trump's term... at a certain point you do need to accept responsibility for your failings and not reupping that supply is a failing.
Yeah, over the last decade+ a mixture of legislators refusing to fund the stockpile and government officials opting not to restock parts of it has left it pretty heavily depleted. When given limited resources you're going to prioritize the most important things and they ended up choosing stuff other than masks and ventilators.
American protectionism is actually part of what created this problem: it was only this week that the Chinese KN95 standard was approved for use by the FDA.