As U.S. discouraged mask use for public, White House team raced to secure face coverings from Taiwan

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Source: Washington Post

As U.S. discouraged mask use for public, White House team raced to secure face coverings from Taiwan for senior staff

By Carol D. Leonnig, Elizabeth Dwoskin and John Hudson
April 15, 2020 at 1:59 p.m. EDT

In mid-March, a National Security Council team rushed to fix what they saw as a threat to the U.S. government’s ability to function amid the advancing pandemic: a lack of masks to protect enough staff on the White House complex.

Alarmed by the small cache and the growing signs of an acute shortage of protective gear in the United States, a senior NSC official turned to a foreign government for help, according to people familiar with the situation.

The outreach resulted in a donation of hundreds of thousands of surgical masks from Taiwan, which had plentiful domestic production and had sharply curtailed the spread of the coronavirus on the island.

While the bulk of Taiwan’s goodwill shipment went to the Strategic National Stockpile, 3,600 were set aside for White House staff and officials, administration officials said.

“While the administration had detailed pandemic response plans, somehow those did not include maintaining a supply of masks for White House personnel,” said an administration official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. “That was a lesson learned. We did look at buying some, but couldn’t find available supply.”

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-us-discouraged-mask-use-for-public-white-house-team-raced-to-secure-face-coverings-from-taiwan-for-senior-staff/2020/04/15/27d815d2-7ac5-11ea-a130-df573469f094_story.html

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