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Asking this question only a handful of years after a global pandemic...

If the next pandemic is 50% deadly, not being able to make gloves is surely the canary in the coal mine proving we wouldn't be able to make any other PPE.

And no country can rely on another if it's do or die. Other blocs will keep to themselves.

Those who do not learn from history... probably don't make gloves.
And in the midst of a start-stop petrochemical supply crisis.
As pointed out earlier, there is also rotation of a stockpile of gloves instead of manufacturing which reduces costs and solves the same issues.

Even things made in America were in short supply during the pandemic because workers were hard to come by as well. A factory isn’t any good if half the people to run it are sick, but it doesn’t take special training to hand out boxes of gloves.

It's amazing how much those spreadsheet heads know nothing about how the actual world works
Doing basic math makes someone a "spreadsheet head"? If the "actual world" wanted American-made gloves then this cash injection from the government would've resulted in a boom in glove manufacturing here, no?

I always see catastrophizing and autarkist-coded takes like this which imply the US is a house of cards because we don't manufacture everything under the sun at all times. You have to realize that preparing for a doomsday scenario like 50% fatality rate pandemic has a cost that someone foots the bill for. Even in 2020 with a buffoon running the country, we still reacted very quickly and developed multiple vaccines to combat a novel virus (yes, the response was bungled in other ways but I digress)... people, markets, etc. are adaptable and we will figure it out.

There are examples of species encountering such species decimating pathogens and we are in a worse position than 2020.

Any investment in such is likely to pay dividends in much less dramatic ordinary catastrophes which have occurred repeatedly and constantly.

It's probably a better investment than our military.

Funny that you mention the military, as the US military is required by law to buy domestic to ensure some sort of domestic supply chains. Even for trivial things like t-shirts and gloves.

Berry Amendment-compliant work gloves, cost more than 4x more than the imported equivalent: https://www.mechanix.com/us-en/all-work-gloves/GVMP-B55.html

You gotta optimize everything for the market man! It's magic! Everything will work out if we only make number go up!

Who cares about silly stuff like health emergencies, the climate catastrophe or war. Number must go up!

correction: the number must go up FASTER. if it just keeps going up same as yesterday, we will lose investors
You don't need to optimise for the market. The market is the optimising machine. Get in its way with slow regulators or subsidies or bailouts and you get all the problems.
Markets optimize for the current gradient, not for the local maxima

Markets will make you climb a hill ignoring it ends on a cliff end

Sounds like a local maximum to me. Did you maybe mean a global maximum?
Why would this even be so. It's not magic it's just people doing stupid people things often to maximize short term factors. It only gets long-term planning insofar as embedded agents do. One of the things agents do is use incentives to inspire behaviour that is conta individuals short term incentives to achieve behaviour that contributes to long-term success.

Not only are many individual agents aligned with short term interests they often either can't because they will be pushed out by short term thinkers or literally benefit from net harm to all. America mostly being composed of the rich not the masses voting with their wallets.

No one's saying it's magic.

This is the same market (or set of markets) that have lifted billions of people out of poverty. If you're arguing central planning does better then I'd love to see some evidence of it, but to my mind the fact that so many companies can coordinate, even across language barriers and legal systems, sometimes hundreds or thousands cooperating to make products, is incredible, and is not going to be beaten by any other system.

At least on average - of course an authoritarian country like the USSR can drag value out of its citizens by force and spend it on the space race, but that kills people and even, in that case, the country itself.

Far better to have cooperation and value exchange based on the demand generated by real people.

Heh sure, it's great at optimizing.

The problem is it's an optimizing function for the rich getting richer, not for the good of society, not for reducing human suffering, not even, y'know, the survival of the human race.

This is just silliness. Rich people got rich under capitalism by providing things people want for the best price. They're rich because they owns shares in valuable businesses that people want to buy the products of.

Some people get rich, on average by merit. And everyone gets the products they want at a low price. Can you imagine if the only cars available were made in the USSR, like Ladas? They were terrible because there was no capitalism, and so no competition. But if you'd rather have abysmal cars but know that no one got rich making them, I guess that's...a choice?

And yet somehow we had no toilet paper in the pandemic. The manufacturers all simultaneously refused to retool.

This proves that the market does not inherently work magic.

Redundancy is just waste wearing a trench coat etc etc.
Well, for the most part this is actually true. Taking care of the exceptions is the hard part.

Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.

>Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.

It takes a deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the reality in front of us.

Our planet is literally dying.

The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]

Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w

[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...

[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...

Looks like most/all manufacturing happens in the SEA/China, so I can see the logic that it could be considered a military risk for it to not be manufactured/possibility to scale manufacturing in America.
Berry Amendment requires US military to buy items manufactured in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment
Someone already decided US should. The important question is whether 1B should have gotten the job done, and if not... is it matter of throwing good $$$ after bad $$$... or is it just bad sign 1B wasn't enough.
I wonder if they can at least create a small scale NBR factory.
Yeah, you should make stuff medical staff needs.
Or maybe not start stupid wars but this is America we're talking so meh...
Also what the cost is. If the US really wants to reshore this sort of work then it will become materially poorer.
The story says the US doesn't have the raw material(s): NBR. Not quite sure what that is.
NBR = nitrile butadiene rubber, a synthetic rubber. Not really a raw material, as it's synthesized.
With all the chemical industry already in the US, and $1B to throw at it, production capacity for the raw material couldn't be included?

It's not like you need a metric ton of it to produce a box of gloves.

The issue is that domestic sources of NBR are few because of the type of petroleum extraction we do here. This makes the cost of NBR relatively high and consequently makes the gloves pricey compared to imported ones. We can definitely make.a glove but no one wants to buy them.
Making them? Not in the least. But being capable of making them? It's a must, be it gloves, EVs, semis, or screws.
It's all a question of price, based on the article. And not planning how much it takes to start up. In any case it's also not feasible to keep a plant on standby, just in case you need it one day.
The USA can make anything if there’s money in it. Right now, I just don’t think there’s any.
nah, you can always import from friendly nations like Denmark, Spain, Canada, Mexico..
It should be able to. A country that can't, cannot hope to remain sovereign in anything but name, for long.
The thing about autarky.

It ain't for people who don't want to work in a plastics factory, I guess.

And it contributed to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Funny coincidence that.

The more important part is how to make people who ask this question a permanent pariahs?
You think someone should be made a permanent pariah for suggesting medical gloves be manufactured in Malaysia or Thailand, rather than the US? Why?
1-200% tariff applied at random if you don't.
The US started the tariff game btw
That is what I'm referring to.
Yes. Next question
Why is it so simple? Instead of investing billions, perhaps a stockpile is a better strategy.
That would be a good thing for you to research to build an understanding for the scale of what you are simplifying. Here's a start; just alone during a rather non-pandemic of 2020-2022 the USA alone used about 1.8 billion, with a B, gloves per week ... week.
So 1 billion dollars buys about 8 billion gloves? Or about 4 weeks? So for 12 billion dollars that's a years slack?

I am not sure what you are getting at, continuously spending money on cost ineffective gloves just in case there is a problem sometime, including the upfront investment.

The scale of the storage? We have 6000 hospitals in the US. which would have to store about 2 million gloves a piece if you decentralized it. The storage space would be about 2 10x10x10 cubes in each location, probably varying dramatically by hospital size. Of course that is just proper hospitals, we have many many more medical facilities that use them. I don't see storage being a problem.

So what is the scale we are talking here? A complete 6 month supply would be half the cost, which still seems excessive. And this is a pandemic scenario we are talking about that uses a lot of gloves, not a national security concern where we would not have that much additional use.

That’s brilliant - the government could pay every hospital to stockpile the annual needs for itself and any local clinics and they would just rotate through the stock and replenish as normal.