WA health officials throw away millions of pandemic supplies

Culling the stockpile

While expired items could prove useful in another emergency, it costs the state money to store them. When deciding what stockpiled items to keep, the state looks at the level of demand for the item, its market value and whether it can be tested to ensure performance past its expiration date, said Portner of the Department of Health.

Once the department determines an item is worth zero dollars and is no longer in demand, the agency seeks to offload it. Hospitals can now source their own supplies thanks to an improved supply chain, Portner said, and some stockpiled N95 masks were made to fit larger face shapes than hospitals need. The state decided that any possible future use for the surgical masks, gowns and gloves was not worth the cost to store them.

“They are expired, there’s no demand, and ultimately they then incur a cost to the state because storage is not free,” Portner said. “At this point, with the market’s ability to support that demand, … expired versions which don’t have that manufacturer endorsement just aren’t sought after.”

The department held on to some items that could be tested and validated for use past their expiration dates, such as N95 masks approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. This process previously allowed masks left over from the swine flu/H1N1 outbreak in the 2000s to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic, Portner said. But there is not a similar process to verify the efficacy of expired surgical masks, he added.

The discarded items also included more than 70,000 expired N95 masks that were not approved by NIOSH. Scrambling to find whatever protection they could, states obtained these at the federal government’s suggestion in 2020, but the FDA no longer endorses their use.

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The agency first reached out to medical schools and community groups to gauge interest in the expired supplies, Portner noted.

The DOH maintains a warehouse of medical supplies in Thurston County. That stockpile currently includes pandemic supplies equivalent to 20% of peak demand during the worst COVID-19 spikes, Portner said. The state currently has more than 13 million N95 masks, about 2 million Antigen and PCR test kits, and more than 50 million gloves, according to an inventory report provided on Feb. 15.