Remember the shortage of medical gowns during COVID? Feds spending $350 million for stockpile

WASHINGTON -- Six U.S. companies will spend at least $350 million to manufacture medical gowns to store in the Strategic National Stockpile, years after doctors and nurses working in hospitals found themselves without the equipment while COVID-19 raged.

The purchase of the gowns is one of the final steps toward shoring up the personal protective equipment in the stockpile after it was depleted just weeks into the COVID pandemic. Equipment had not been regularly restocked in the years before the crisis began.

The new gowns are among the many purchases the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response has made in recent years to restock the emergency coffers, assistant secretary Dawn O'Connell said.

The administration wants to “make sure the country would never be caught in the same position they were in 2020, when the stockpile was opened on one of our worst days, one of our worst months, and people couldn't find what they needed in it," O'Connell said.

A range of U.S. companies were selected to manufacture the gowns, including a California lacrosse equipment maker and a New York embroidery studio.

In total, about 250 million gowns should be manufactured under the deal. It'll leave the stockpile with about a 90-day supply of the gowns should another emergency hit. The agency has also stockpiled 1.5 billion gloves and 1.1 billion masks.

The Strategic National Stockpile is supposed to keep a robust supply of medicines, vaccines, medical equipment and supplies at the ready for disasters and pandemics.

But that didn't happen in 2020, when COVID-19 started its spread in an outbreak that would ultimately kill more than 1.2 million people in the United States and millions more around the globe.

The early days of the pandemic were marked by images of doctors and nurses wrapping themselves in trash bags. People turned to cloth masks after medical masks became virtually impossible to find. Companies illegally gouged the price of some medical necessities, like gloves or masks. And many states were left to purchase the products on their own, without help from the federal government.

Some states even bought too much, leaving them with a glut of hastily purchased medical equipment, some of them cheaply made or expired. States, an Associated Press investigation found, have trashed millions of gloves, masks and gowns in recent months.

“States had to act on their own," O'Connell said. "There were a lot of panic purchases that were done.”