A rare look inside the Strategic National Stockpile — and how it went wrong at the start of the pandemic
NBC News was granted exclusive access into one of the Strategic National Stockpile's facilities. Early in the Covid pandemic, the stockpile couldn't provide essential medical gear like masks.
It’s a warehouse few have seen or even know exist. Photography of the outside isn’t allowed, and images of the inside are tightly controlled.
Not that images of the inside are terribly compelling: Aisle after aisle, spanning six football fields, stacked high with cardboard boxes. Sealed inside those boxes are vital medical supplies, such as vaccines and antibiotics, ready to be shipped out in the event of a life-threatening public health emergency.
If not for the security guards checking credentials, it’d be easy to dismiss the facility — one of more than 12 strategically located across the United States — as just another warehouse. The facility, part of the Strategic National Stockpile, rose to prominence in the early days of the Covid pandemic — not for its utility, but for its failure to provide health care workers with lifesaving supplies.
NBC News was granted exclusive access inside one of the top-secret facilities — the first news organization allowed inside with television cameras since the pandemic began — and spoke with federal health officials who are now grappling with rebuilding supplies, correcting the mistakes of the Covid crisis and trying to prepare for the next pandemic.
The early missteps can be attributed, in part, to a series of choices made by an obscure governing body about how to stock the stockpile — decisions made without input from health care workers or domestic manufacturers, experts said.
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