The stockpile was a running sore throughout the crisis. In April, the federal government started distributing ventilators from the stockpile to backstop hard-hit cities. When the machines arrived, they didn’t work. The New York Times reported that HHS had assured governors that the stockpile was holding about ten thousand ventilators in reserve and had another ten thousand on order.24 But the government had allowed a key contract for maintaining the machines to lapse, and more than two thousand of the ventilators on hand were not functional.25 Similarly, when masks were shipped from the
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