On Wednesday, we announced that we will be making 400 million NIOSH-certified N95 masks from the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) available to the American people for free. These masks, which began rolling out of ASPR’s facilities yesterday, will be made available at thousands of pharmacies and community health centers nationwide. It’s one way we’re making higher quality masks available to the American people.

The Strategic National Stockpile ships the first deliveries of N95 masks for the American public. (ASPR photo)

This effort represents the largest deployment by the Strategic National Stockpile to date and it’s also the largest deployment of personal protective equipment in U.S. history. While we have a lot of work ahead of us, this effort is only possible because of the steps we’ve taken to restore the SNS over the past year.

Since January 2021, we have tripled the number of N95 masks held in the SNS to more than 750 million. Even after this deployment we will have 350 million surgical, FDA-cleared N95s for use as needed by healthcare workers. That’s nearly 20 times as many N95 masks as there are health care workers in the U.S. We will continue to assess the number of masks needed and replenish the stockpile accordingly – and as we do, we will continue to focus on domestically manufactured masks.

At the same time, this week, in partnership with the White House and U.S. Postal Service we opened up ordering on COVIDTests.gov for Americans to request four free at-home tests, exceeded more than a million doses of therapeutics delivered by H-CORE this month, and continued to deploy additional National Disaster Medical Teams to assist in communities’ COVID-19 response.

Our work is far from over on COVID-19, but today we have more tools – vaccines, boosters, masks, tests, and treatments – than at any time before.