A new proposal in Congress aims to alleviate future supply chain disruptions like the shortages of personal protective equipment, COVID-19 tests, ventilators and other medical gear seen during the onset of the pandemic.
The measure, introduced Jan. 28 and called the Medical and Health Stockpile Accountability Act, would require the federal government to create a national tracking system for those supplies.
New Jersey health officials warned that shortages of such materials, especially in the early days of COVID-19 in March and April 2020, hampered the health care response to the pandemic.
Images began to emerge of fatigued nurses using trash bags as makeshift personal protective equipment. The anecdotes and visuals painted a dire picture of the state’s health care infrastructure: With hospitals overwhelmed and the global supply chain collapsing, many medical professionals were left without the basic materials needed to do their jobs.
Under former President Donald Trump, the White House struggled to get equipment out of its Strategic National Stockpile. Garden State manufacturers shifted to producing their own equipment such as masks, but faced difficulty coordinating with businesses outside of New Jersey. States scrounged over a dwindling supply and the national stockpile quickly ran dry, with Trump falsely claiming that the Obama administration left an empty “stockpile with a cupboard that was bare.”
“It was completely shocking to discover at the beginning of the pandemic — when New Jersey was hit so hard and our hospitals were in desperate need of masks and ventilators — that we had no way of knowing the quantity, location, or production of these supplies,” reads a prepared Jan. 31 statement from the bill’s main sponsor, U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat from Bergen County.
The proposed legislation calls for an automated national supply chain tracking system to be run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
It would provide “near real-time insight into the amount of critical medical and health supplies” in the Strategic National Stockpile, as well as the inventories of hospitals, manufacturers, distributors and other local public health entities.
By automating the tracking system, the new structure would eliminate the “burden and errors” that come with manual reporting, according to Gottheimer’s office.
The new system would also provide estimates for when inventories would be replenished, and guidelines and practices for how the data should be accessed and used by the public and private sectors. Annual stress tests would be run on the system.
The federal government would also need to develop a means by which proprietary and confidential information is kept private so as to avoid “advantaging any institution over another, or undermining the competitive marketplace.”
A similar bill had been proposed in the U.S Senate by Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, that would also create a national supply chain database.
Proponents argue that during the early stages of the pandemic, officials understood what PPE components were produced locally, but had no awareness of what was available in neighboring states and across the country.
“We have a database with over 9,000” manufacturers and businesses, but “our databases didn’t talk to each other,” John Kennedy, president of the New Jersey Manufacturing Extension Program, said in December. “Here we are trying to put the pieces together here to try to figure out who makes parts for certain types of PPE and ventilators, and it was taking us weeks.”
New Jersey has been trying to build out its own PPE manufacturing capability, but progress has been slow.
Labor shortages, shipping delays and other supply chains issues – like global geopolitical tensions – have worsened the issue.
“Three years later, that problem still exists. We just don’t have a handle on the exact quantities of critical medical supplies and drugs that are on U.S. soil at any given time,” Gottheimer continued. “And this lack of visibility is hurting us again.”
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