The detail doing the most work is in your footnote: as far as you could find, exactly one factory did this. That makes Braskem less a model than a measure of the gap. What protected the N95 supply was one creative idea, eighty willing people, and an employer who happened to pay them like the work mattered. None of it was designed in, and almost none of it was reproduced.
I’d resist reading this as “the market and a few heroes had it covered,” but also the opposite reflex that what we lacked was a better central plan. The US did have pandemic plans. The thing that stayed with me from The Premonition is how little the formal apparatus mattered when it counted, and how much came from people at the margins of the system who saw further than the institutions did. Your “authorities and amateurs” point is that same tension, and Braskem is a data point for it, not against it.
So the question I’d sit with isn’t “wasn’t this heroic” or “why didn’t we plan for it,” but what institutional arrangement makes on-site continuity and supply resilience a default rather than a fluke, without designing out the thing that actually worked here: competent people improvising, trusted and paid to. The ALLFED project @jamesmulhall🔹 mentions seems exactly the right shape, turning a lucky one-off into something repeatable, compensation and trust included. COVID was a fairly forgiving test of all this; worth building the system while that’s still true.
The detail doing the most work is in your footnote: as far as you could find, exactly one factory did this. That makes Braskem less a model than a measure of the gap. What protected the N95 supply was one creative idea, eighty willing people, and an employer who happened to pay them like the work mattered. None of it was designed in, and almost none of it was reproduced.
I’d resist reading this as “the market and a few heroes had it covered,” but also the opposite reflex that what we lacked was a better central plan. The US did have pandemic plans. The thing that stayed with me from The Premonition is how little the formal apparatus mattered when it counted, and how much came from people at the margins of the system who saw further than the institutions did. Your “authorities and amateurs” point is that same tension, and Braskem is a data point for it, not against it.
So the question I’d sit with isn’t “wasn’t this heroic” or “why didn’t we plan for it,” but what institutional arrangement makes on-site continuity and supply resilience a default rather than a fluke, without designing out the thing that actually worked here: competent people improvising, trusted and paid to. The ALLFED project @jamesmulhall🔹 mentions seems exactly the right shape, turning a lucky one-off into something repeatable, compensation and trust included. COVID was a fairly forgiving test of all this; worth building the system while that’s still true.