Biden Will Provide 400 Million N95 Masks for Free - The New York Times

The masks will be distributed at pharmacies and community health centers, but some public health experts said the effort was coming too late.

WASHINGTON — Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, Americans who have had a hard time getting their hands on masks and at-home tests are suddenly being showered with offers of freebies — courtesy of taxpayers and the Biden administration, which had come under sharp criticism for not acting sooner.

On Wednesday, the administration announced that it would make 400 million nonsurgical N95 masks available free of charge at community health centers and retail pharmacies across the United States.

The stockpile was badly depleted at the outset of the pandemic, leaving health care workers without masks and other personal protective gear essential to fighting the coronavirus.

The decision to distribute masks from the stockpile to the public is a sharp departure from prior practice; in the past, they were reserved for health care workers.

This month, in a series of opinion articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association, six former advisers to President Biden’s transition team called for a new pandemic strategy that would include making N95 masks free and easily available to all Americans, and vastly increasing the number of free coronavirus tests.

So while he announced shortly before Christmas that his administration would purchase 500 million rapid tests to distribute free to the public, Americans had to wait for them.

Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, adding, “I think that was a real failure of the administration, to not have more tests available by the time we got into the holidays.”.

The White House also announced that it would make 400 million N95 masks available free of charge at health centers and pharmacies across the U.S.

The White House said in a statement on Wednesday that the government would begin shipping N95 masks to pharmacies and health centers at the end of this week, and that the masks were expected to be available starting at the end of next week.

At a Senate hearing last week, Dawn O’Connell, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the stockpile now had 737 million N95 masks, all from domestic manufacturers.

Lisa O’Connor, the former chief nursing officer at Boston Medical Center, said she was concerned that distributing stockpile assets to the public would put health care workers at risk.