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It’s December 2019, and the world has not yet been rocked by the Covid-19 pandemic. N95 masks cost an estimated 44 to 70 cents per unit. And talks of tariffs are everywhere, as President Donald Trump prepares to issue a 7.5% tariff on medical supplies after denying an exemption.
The first cases of Covid-19 were detected soon after, and the need for personal protective equipment (PPE) like N95s, with costs shooting up to $12 per mask, became even more apparent, hitting hospital bottom lines hard.
In 2025, there’s a sense of déjà vu. Trump is back in office and tariffs are back on the table (though some have been paused for now). And according to many experts, like Jenn Kerfoot, chief strategy and growth officer at health tech company Duos, it’s not a matter of if there’s another global pandemic, but when. Between possible tariffs and the Trump administration's measures to defund and cut staff at public health agencies, experts are concerned preparations for the next public health emergency may be compromised.
“Tariffs under normal circumstances are moderate and uncomfortable,” Kerfoot said, and that gets even worse “when you increase the demand [for tariffed supplies] exponentially, like a global health crisis.”
“Catastrophic” cuts
New York City was one of the hardest hit cities in the US early in the pandemic, due to its large and dense population (New York saw 35,736 deaths per 100,000 residents on average in 2020, more than every other state).
Five years since the virus first hit the city, Michelle Morse, acting health commissioner and chief medical officer of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which works to protect and make New Yorkers healthier, told Healthcare Brew she is proud of the agency’s rehabilitation.
However, the city’s recovery efforts are now facing challenges, as the CDC under the Trump administration pulled more than $100 million in grants for its Covid recovery work like vaccination levels and disease prevention, which Morse called “catastrophic.”
“We’re not in the emergency phase of the pandemic, but we still have tremendous work to do to address the public health concerns, vaccination concerns, safety concerns, etc.,” Morse said.
New Yorkers are also more likely than most major city dwellers to experience public health emergencies, Morse said, adding that cuts to funding leave the population more vulnerable to diseases like measles, tuberculosis, HIV, and more.
She said New Yorkers are less safe now due to the federal government’s cuts to staff.
“We are, I would say, at a new level of public health emergency risk because of the actions of the federal government,” Morse added.
Provider preparations
Nearby, Mount Sinai, a health system based in New York City, took lessons from the pandemic to prepare for future public health emergencies, Michael Redlener, an emergency physician and deputy director of its Center for Healthcare Readiness, told us.
This includes issuing more protocols for managing supplies, like stockpiling PPE, contracting with product distributors, and creating a production plan using mathematical models that predict supplies against patient numbers. About 50% of 51 hospitals in a 2020 survey reported that when Covid hit, their stockpiles did not last more than two weeks.
Still, “there’s a lot of aspects of equipment and supplies that are outside of the hospital’s control,” he said, including natural disasters like the hurricanes that caused IV shortages last year.
Redlender is also concerned about cuts at HHS and potential cuts to the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), which is in charge of a national stockpile of emergency response supplies.
“We should be very conscientious about how we make cuts,” he said, and ensuring that healthcare providers have easy access to medical equipment that “support healthcare readiness” is “really important.”