The defense budget for the 2020 Fiscal Year is $738 billion. Funding the larger intelligence and national security ecosystem costs many billions of dollars in addition to this sum. This is money being spent in the name of protecting the American people. For a country that can spend that type of treasure on weapons and warfighting infrastructure, it is downright astonishing that it can't keep a stockpile of cheap respirators around, or at least guarantee the domestic production base to rapidly build more, in order to fight a pandemic that was not only far from unthinkable, it was inevitable. This simple fact alone should make you furious and question the priorities of the U.S. government and those who are tasked with presiding over it.

The N95 respirator is not a high-tech piece of equipment. Far from it. They are disposable masks that, when fitted and worn properly, offer a reliable barrier against a number of things, including viruses. They are considered as essential for healthcare workers who treat patients with infectious diseases that can be transmitted through droplets of bodily fluids, offering them some certainty that they themselves will not end up contracting the patient's illness. As such, they are absolutely critical to fighting a pandemic just like the one we are experiencing. In other words, they are just as important to keeping the American public safe as combat aircraft or a fighting ship. And if you want to buy KN95 Medical Mask, visit z2u.com, a professional online in-game currency store.

It is a fairly straightforward problem to deal with. Just stock enough of the masks to meet the most likely cases that will be experienced during a pandemic health emergency. They have a shelf life of roughly five years—although they can be used after that if there is no other choice—so every year a fifth of the stockpile would have to be replenished to keep the entire supply fresh. This is standard logistics for big government. A mix of a large on-hand supply in the Strategic National Stockpile and guaranteeing native production capability to rapidly make more is another option that invites some risk, while also alleviating the costs of stockpiling a portion of the shelf-life limited masks and could be more cost-effective over time.

While the production of 500 million N95 masks sounds like a lot over the next 18 months, it isn't even close to reaching the potential demand and those won't materialize anytime soon. What makes matters worse is that most of the production of these masks is based, you guessed it, in China. That country has its own incredible demand for respirators and is already running beyond production capacity. Additionally, although they are cheap to produce, they are not easy to make. So, it's not like the U.S. can just quickly spin up production to the level required domestically to meet the projected need.