As medical professionals across the United States are begging for personal protective equipment (PPE) to fight the coronavirus outbreak, a Texas company has bought nearly 2 million N95 masks, offering the seller $6 for each piece.
Remember, the mask was available at $1 apiece before the pandemic.
At a time when medical professionals are in a desperate need for N95 facemasks, which filter out more than 95 percent of infectious particulates, experts have criticized stating that a price hike like that smacks of profiteering.
An anonymous industry salesperson said, “You’re not just marking it up like 50 cents. This is highway robbery. It’s just disgusting to me.”
Beaumont-based Hatfield and Co. said it had not marked up the product excessively or engaged in price gouging. The company told The Texas Tribune that its supplier set the “terms and conditions” for the sale.
Citing the contractual agreements, the company declined to reveal the supplier’s identity or quantify how much it stood to profit.
Hatfield and Co. salesman Brad Lindeman said the company had access to an undisclosed quantity of the N95 facemasks stored in warehouses all over Texas and other states.
Lindeman said, “There are some in Houston, Dallas, Florida and you know, I guess you would say spread out all over.”
“The inventories are constantly moving, so it’s kind of hard to explain exactly what the quantities are,” he added.
Without elaborating much, Lindeman said a group of doctors has the masks.
On Monday, Hatfield’s president and chief operating officer, Scott Beeman, said they bought the masks from a reseller the company had not worked with before.
However, Beeman declined to reveal the reseller’s identity. He said he had “no way of knowing … the veracity of the statement that [Lindeman] was told regarding a doctor or a consortium of doctors owning or having access to this material.”
“I cannot release any information about our supplier; we do have a written quotation from that company,” Beeman wrote in an email.
“We will be willing to disclose that to the State’s Attorney General and/or to the head of Purchasing for our customer, so that they can both verify that there was no ‘price gouging’ involved in our pricing to the customer,” he added.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Ken Paxton said he will not tolerate people and businesses making profits using the coronavirus pandemic. It is illegal to charge excessive or exorbitant prices for necessities during a natural disaster under the state’s price-gouging laws.
