American buyers waving wads of cash managed to wrest control of a consignment of masks as it was about to be dispatched from China to one of the worst-hit coronavirus areas of France, according to two French officials.
The masks were on a plane at Shanghai airport ready to take off when the US buyers turned up and offered three times what the French were paying.
Jean Rottner, a doctor and president of the GrandEst regional council, said part of the order of several million masks heading for the region, where intensive care units are inundated with Covid-19 patients, had been lost to the buyers.
“On the tarmac, they arrive, get the cash out … so we really have to fight,” Rottner told RTL radio.
While Rottner would not identify the buyers, who they were working for or say which US state the cargo was flown to, another French official also involved in procuring masks from China said the group were acting for the US government.
“The icing on the cake, there is a foreign country that paid three times the price of the cargo on the tarmac,” Rénaud Muselier, head of the south-eastern Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, told the French channel, BFMTV. The Guardian has contacted the US state department for comment.
In Brazil, at a press conference on Wednesday, the health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, said recent attempts by Brasília to purchase protection gear such as gloves and masks from China had fallen through. “Today the US sent 23 of their biggest cargo planes to China to pick up the material they had acquired. Many of our purchases – which we had hoped to confirm in order to supply [our health system] – fell through,” he told reporters.
“The whole world wants [these things] too. There is a problem of hyper-demand,” Mandetta added, asking ordinary Brazilians to make themselves homemade masks from pieces of cloth so that health professionals could access the remaining professional equipment.
As the pandemic worsens, panicked governments have been accused of using questionable methods to acquire supplies in the battle against the coronavirus. Tactics have ranged from blocking exports of medical supplies to sending spies on clandestine missions to find coronavirus tests.
Fearing shortages and a strain on their health systems, a number of states, including France, Germany and Russia, have taken measures such as stockpiling masks and hazmat (hazardous materials) suits. This has meant limiting the exports of protective medical equipment.
Turkey allegedly went further, not only banning exports of protective gear but also appearing to renege on foreign sales of masks that had already been paid for.
Reports by the Belgian newspaper Le Soir and Italian daily Corriere della Sera said Turkish-made masks destined for those countries had never arrived. In Italy, it took more than two weeks following a phone call from the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the masks to be released. In Belgium, supplies had still not been delivered despite a formal police complaint from the country’s health ministry.
As well as its export bans, Turkey threatened to commandeer domestic mask producers to make sure they provided only to the state. Local news outlet Hurriyet quoted the interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, as saying that authorities would seize factories if companies did not agree to sell on an exclusive basis to the health ministry.
China, the world’s largest mask manufacturer, was first hit by the Covid-19 outbreak and has also been accused of stashing its supplies. But it has also been one of the few countries to later go the other way, sending millions of masks to Europe in sales or as donations. One such shipment bound for Italy transited through the Czech Republic, where it was seized by authorities under disputed circumstances.
Czech authorities denied allegations of state-backed stealing by Giornale Radio Rai, the radio news arm of Italy’s public broadcasting company, RAI. They said the masks had made their way to a warehouse north of Prague, where they were confiscated in an anti-trafficking operation. The foreign minister, Tomas Petricek, later said his government had sent 110,000 masks to Rome as compensation.
A similar incident occurred in Kenya, where a shipment of up to 6m masks mysteriously disappeared while transiting through the east African country, although there has been no suggestion that the government was responsible.
Drugs and coronavirus tests, too, are coveted around the globe. After the US president suggested – without fully backed scientific evidence – that a common anti-malaria drug could treat Covid-19, India immediately moved to ban exports of hydroxychloroquine.
Meanwhile, in Israel, the country’s Mossad intelligence agency launched several clandestine international operations to fly in hundreds of thousands of coronavirus testing kits.
Local media reports, citing unidentified medical and intelligence officials, suggested the kits had been bought from an enemy state that would not want such a deal to be made public. Many countries do not recognise Israel because to its treatment of Palestinians.
In recent weeks, a few governments have even moved to stockpile domestic food supplies. Kazakhstan, a major flour producer, banned shipments out of the country, while Vietnam, the world’s third largest rice exporter, did the same with rice. And after Serbia moved to block medicine exports, it later decided to ban exports of sunflower oil.
While global food shortages are not anticipated and most countries have kept their markets open, efforts by anxious governments to wrest control of resources have many spooked.
Abraham L Newman, a professor at Georgetown University’s department of government, and Henry Farrell, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, warned of the risk of the world “sequestering into distrust and selfishness”.
“[T]he high level of mutual suspicion currently brewing between states will make it harder to coordinate an international response,” they wrote in the Havard Business Review. “It is hard for governments to be generous when their citizens are frightened and supplies are tight. Yet it may lead to a spiral of fear and retaliation.”
Last month, German media reported that the Trump administration had offered a German medical company “large sums of money” for exclusive access to a vaccine. Despite the fact that the company, CureVac, denied the reports, the incident clearly rattled other countries.
China’s state-run Global Times published an editorial describing the search for a vaccine as “a battle that China cannot afford to lose”.
Citing the reports on CureVac, it said: “Given the two leading western countries’ moves, we can see there is no way for China to rely on Europe or the US in vaccine development. China has to be by itself in this crucial field.”
