The most important story of the weekend could be found in, of all places, the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Andrew Artenstein, a physician and hospital administrator from the western part of the Commonwealth (God save it!) wrote a hair-raising saga of his efforts to get ahold of the supplies of PPE that his facility had ordered and his efforts to keep those vital supplies from being hijacked by the federal government.

A lead came from an acquaintance of a friend of a team member. After several hours of vetting, we grew confident of the broker’s professional pedigree and the potential to secure a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators. The latter were KN95 respirators, N95s that were made in China. We received samples to confirm that they could be successfully fit-tested. Despite having cleared this hurdle, we remained concerned that the samples might not be representative of the bulk of the products that we would be buying. Having acquired the requisite funds — more than five times the amount we would normally pay for a similar shipment, but still less than what was being requested by other brokers — we set the plan in motion. Three members of the supply-chain team and a fit tester were flown to a small airport near an industrial warehouse in the mid-Atlantic region. I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected.

If and when this all finally passes, we are going to have developed a generation of doctors with a tremendous gift for smuggling. But amazingly, the story gets even stranger.

Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals...I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse.

This is not a system. This is organized piracy. And its organizing principle is to use a pandemic to improve the political standing of an incompetent and criminal president*. There are weird stories coming from a number of places; something strange is said to be going on at LAX, according to people involved in trying to get supplies to areas hard hit by the pandemic. This has to be investigated harshly when there is an opportunity to do so. And these people’s great-grandchildren should have to be answering motions in thousands of negligence suits. No future historian is going to believe it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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