N-95 masks were depleted by 2009 swine flu but never replaced by Team Obama despite warnings

If you've been following the Mainstream Media you may have heard--endlessly--that there's only one facemask that's thought to be effective.  It's called the N-95.  And of course the media has screamed like mad that it's "in short supply."  "We're running out!"

The media blame Trump, cuz it fits their Narrative.  For example, last week Bloomberg published a story about the mask shortages, painting a ghastly picture of chaos in our nation’s hospitals--and blaming the problem on the Trump administration, because the Strategic National Stockpile is depleted.

And sure enough, last month HHS secretary Alex Azar told Congress the national stockpile of N95 respirator masks was 12 million—a mere fraction of the 1.7 billion masks government scientists estimated back in 2015 would be needed in the event of a severe flu outbreak.

But the national stockpile used to be much larger. What happened to it?

Buried several paragraphs deep in the Bloomberg story we read that “after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”

That's right, the shortage of N95 masks can be traced back to the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic of 2009.  Gosh, does anyone remember who was president back then?  Cuz Bloomberg doesn't.

The Los Angeles Times published its own story last week about why the mask supply was never replaced after the 2009 swine flu epidemic.  According to their story a federally sponsored task force recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks be replenished--but it wasn’t.  But like Bloomberg, the Times couldn't bring themselves to link Obama to that failure, cuz, reasons.

In short, even though the Obama administration was advised to replenish the national stockpile of the N95 respirator masks, they didn’t.  Despite the fact that two mainstream media outlets traced the cause of the shortage back to 2009, they and the rest of the media ignored those findings and accuse Trump of poor planning and trying to deflect responsibility. 

Obviously in 2009 Barack Obama was president, but not once in either story did Bloomberg or the Los Angeles Times link the failure to replenish the N95 respirator masks to the Obama administration ignoring recommendations to do so.  Obama had six years to restore that stockpile.  But he didn’t. Yet the media wants you to believe it’s all Trump’s fault.

I'm waiting for a memo to be "discovered" by an Obama holdover, claiming that his agency warned Trump that the stockpile of masks still hadn't been replenished, and that Trump ignored that warning.