“Petroleum products are intrinsic to modern health care,” is the way an article in the American Journal of Public Health put it. “Plastics are central to the antiseptic model of modern health care.” Look at a hospital operating room—gloves, tubing, the bags for intravenous liquids, instruments, and the tools that insert stents into ailing heart patients. Moreover, “[Ninety-nine percent] of pharmaceutical feedstocks and reagents are derived from petrochemicals.” As for the N95 face masks that became the emblem of the coronavirus epidemic, they are made with petrochemicals.
