Free Republic

When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in an unprepared U.S., states scrambled for masks and other protective gear. Three years later, as the grips of the pandemic have loosened, many states are now trying to deal with an excess of protective gear, ditching their supplies in droves. With expiration dates passing and few requests to tap into its stockpile, Ohio auctioned off 393,000 gowns for just $2,451 and ended up throwing away another 7.2 million, along with expired masks, gloves and other materials. The now expiring supplies had cost about $29 million in federal money

City officials auctioned off nearly $225 million worth of surplus COVID-19 medical equipment and safety gear for just $500,000 — or a paltry 0.2 cents on the dollar, according to a stunning report Tuesday.De Blasio’s administration also overpaid for items that included 50,000 face shields at $6.70 each, compared to an average price at the start of the pandemic of $3.67, The City said, citing information from city Comptroller Brad Lander. They’re now part of a massive lot of 701,000 face shields that were reportedly put up for auction last week with an opening bid of just $1,000, or 0.14...

UNIVERSITY CITY, Mo. (AP) — When the coronavirus pandemic first hit the U.S., sales of window coverings at Halcyon Shades quickly went dark. So the suburban St. Louis business did what hundreds of other small manufacturers did: It pivoted to make protective supplies, with help from an $870,000 government grant. But things haven’t worked out as planned. The company quit making face shields because it wasn’t profitable. It still hasn’t sold a single N95 mask because of struggles to get equipment, materials and regulatory approval. “So far, it has been a net drain of funds and resources and energy,” Halcyon...

Just days after more than $10 million worth of personal protective equipment was found outside damaged by rain at a Bay Area event center, a similar discovery was made at a Hollister business where hundreds of thousands of face shields were found outside and are now headed to the landfill, never to be used. “That's a shame because if it would've gone to someplace that really needed it, it would've been used in a proper fashion, it's a downright shame,” said Antonio Rodriguez, who saw hundreds of boxes piled high. The face shields are owned by ICU Eyewear out of...

San Mateo County workers are scrambling to clean up a mess uncovered by the ABC7 I-Team. More than $10 million worth of precious personal protective equipment-- purchased with your tax dollars - was left outside in the rain. We all know how important masks, hospital gowns, and other protective gear are, as the COVID pandemic surges yet again. This seems hard to believe, but top county officials didn't know that thousands of boxes of PPE were moved outside and forgotten for months until the I-Team told them. Dan Noyes got a tip on a recent rainy day and went straight...

About $7 million worth of surplus personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies, purchased by a Northern California county earlier in the pandemic, was damaged in recent rainstorms after it was left outside for months, officials said Friday. San Mateo County officials acknowledged the disaster following a KGO news report, published Thursday, that showed video of scores of sodden boxes outside the San Mateo Event Center in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Mateo County, south of San Francisco, is among the wealthiest counties in the nation. Workers are inspecting the damaged boxes to see if the items inside — many...

An Olentangy Local School District employee of 13 years was forced to resign for comments she made linking the coronavirus to China and the country's subsequent profiting from personal protective equipment, according to a federal lawsuit filed last week. The incident in April wasn't the only time Antoinette Evans, a 68-year-old study hall aide from Delaware County, has been disciplined for disruptive speech by the district, the fifth-largest in Ohio. The lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Columbus alleges that the district and three administrators at Olentangy Liberty High School, where Evans worked, "fabricated from Evans' innocent words...

CHINA tried to “blackmail” the US by threatening to block life-saving Covid medical supplies unless it stopped saying there was a cover-up over the origins of the coronavirus, it has been claimed. President Xi Jinping is said to have made the threat in a phone call to Donald Trump last spring when evidence first emerged suggesting the virus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan. Then President Donald Trump’s State Department issued a statement on January 15 this year, saying there was evidence several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory were sick with Covid-like symptoms in autumn...

US medical professionals have devised an inventive to celebrate Christmas in the time of the coronavirus: by decorating trees with facemasks, hand sanitizer and other personal protective equipment (PPE). The trend is currently getting attention on social media, despite a continuing shortage of the equipment in increasingly burdened hospitals

Discarded masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) have begun to wash into the San Francisco Bay with the arrival of the first winter rains, creating a new local pollution problem. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday: The Bay Area’s first rain of the season is washing away worries of wildfire and drought. But it’s also bringing a new concern: gobs of face masks flooding San Francisco Bay. Early season storms typically sweep a slurry of debris from streets and sidewalks into rivers, creeks and bays. This year, the fall flush not only contains the usual gunk, waste experts say, but...

1. Joe Biden says everyone should wear a mask. But what he does not say is that the only reason we have enough masks for everyone to wear is due to the efforts of the Trump administration.— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) October 27, 2020 2. Early on, Fauci told the American public NOT to wear masks. He intentionally lied to us because the Obama-Biden administration had not produced enough PPEs to go around. There was no proper planning for a pandemic.— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) October 27, 2020 3. And Fauci held his current position back them as well....

The Great Barrington Declaration offers a way forward, but do most Americans have the courage to risk their sense of security to maintain enduring liberty?In an era in which every dubious decision is “due to COVID-19,” we hear policymakers repeating the same mantra: “If just one life is saved,” it’s worth relinquishing our freedoms, our sanity, and possibly our future. More often than not, this ethical dilemma is presented without mentioning the obvious trade-offs or long-term consequences.Imagine you’re an administrative dictator. If you could “save just one life” — or even thousands — by crippling the youth, vaporizing a million...

It’s PPE to die for. The city Department of Education is supplying schools with defective thermometers, “low quality” masks, and smelly wipes, a disgusted Queens principal told The Post. “The s—t they gave us won’t protect us — not the students, teachers or parents,” fumed the educator. “Every principal in NYC is banging their head against the wall.” “The “cheap, black-market crap” includes touchless, electronic thermometers that registered temperatures at 40, 50 and 60 degrees. “You’d be dead,” she said. “We keep taking each other’s temperatures like we’re clowns.” The school leader, who asked for anonymity to avoid repercussions, said...

I was possibly exposed to COVID 19 over the weekend and was surprised to see this on the CDC Website: A couple of things: 1. Exposed means being closer than 6 feet to a KNOWN or suspected COVID carrier for at least 15 minutes. In that criteria isn't met then the CDC doesn't consider it exposure to COVID 19. But note the note: "Note: This is irrespective of whether the person with COVID-19 or the contact was wearing a mask or whether the contact was wearing respiratory personal protective equipment (PPE)" In other words WEARING mask doesn't matter. If you...

Daniel Horowitz Retweeted       Replying to @Hi5HANK @RMConservativeand@thehill

In a similar way, face masks are tied to the political conflict over our response to the coronavirus. Those who lean left politically tend to see the virus as a more dire threat; those on the right are more likely to downplay its seriousness or compare it to less deadly strains like the flu, often following the lead of conservative politicians. Accordingly, masks may be seen as a marker of political loyalty, triggering feelings of us-versus-them. A politically liberal person may assume that someone wearing a mask is “on their team,” while those who don’t wear masks must be Fox...

China’s Communist Party is again seizing factory lines churning out the world’s supply of medical safety gear — sparking fears the country is preparing for a second wave of the coronavirus, American traders in China told The Post. New Yorker Moshe Malamud, who has done business in China for over two decades, was moving tens of millions of pieces of protective gear to the U.S. at the height of the crisis but said suppliers in recent weeks had been overwhelmed with orders from the Chinese government. “I was placing a larger order with one of the bigger distributors and he...

The Trump administration has sent another large haul of personal protective equipment to the hard-hit Empire State as it continues to battle the deadliest coronavirus outbreak in the US, The Post has learned. The shipment sent on Friday includes nearly one million pairs of gloves, 200,000 masks, 194,000 gowns and 18,000 protective eye goggles and will be received by New York state health authorities who will decide where to distribute it, a White House source said. “Under President Trump’s leadership, New York has received an unprecedented level of federal resources to respond to COVID-19,” one White House official said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday announced that it has canceled the approval for some manufacturers in China to sell N95 respirators in the United States, as they failed to offer adequate protection against the new coronavirus. A number of these respirators failed to demonstrate a minimum particulate filtration efficiency of 95% upon testing, the agency said. The FDA’s move on Thursday follows its decision last month to ask China to revise new export quality control rules for protective equipment needed, so they are not an obstacle to timely supplies. The agency said it had previously authorized the...

The Chinese embassy to Canada on Monday claimed that a minor “contractual” issue caused a million Chinese N95 masks exported to Canada last month to be defective and useless. The Chinese claimed the contractual issue has been addressed. Canadian officials were literally left speechless by the embassy’s breezy statement. The huge shipment of masks in question was rejected by inspectors from the Canadian Health Ministry in the last week of April because they did not meet filtration standards. The masks were actually built to the KN95 standard, a Chinese designation considered substandard by the United States but normally accepted as...