In April 2020, just as the world was starting to go into the first of many lockdowns, ProPublica investigative reporter J David McSwane tagged along on a private jet with a businessman on a mission to buy medical face masks for the government.
The businessman had no experience, no industry connections, but somehow got a $US34.5 million deal to supply them.
That flight started McSwane’s two-year journey uncovering shady networks and scammers who took advantage of Covid-19 chaos and dysfunction to profit from the pandemic.
He follows the money in his book Pandemic, Inc. Chasing The Capitalists And Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick.
Photo: supplied
McSwane tells Afternoons he expected to uncover some greed in the industry, but this was beyond what he imagined.
“People came out of the woodwork to take advantage of their own government and to take advantage of their own neighbours in ways that we had never seen before.”
Focusing on the Department of Veterans Affairs, which oversees the largest hospital network in America, he says he found a $US34.5m contract for masks went to a businessman with little background in medical supply.
After a phone call with the businessman, Robert Stewart Jr, the reporter ended up on a private jet with him heading to Chicago to learn more about the masks.
“He’s trying to explain to me where the masks are and I can’t quite put it together and so I’m taking down notes and at the end of the day, I see all these calls happening and I’m starting to fully put it together that I think he made the whole thing up [and didn’t know where the masks are].”
McSwane says he continued to track government spending on PPE and uncovered similar plots.
“I end up in Texas, I’m talking to a guy whose entire job was to pull masks out of bags that said ‘not for medical use’ and put them in bags that looked the same but don’t say ‘not for medical use’ so that they could sell them to hospitals.
“Before you know it, I’m talking to people who are selling fake test kits. It just got out of hand.”
While Stewart Jr ended up in prison, some got away with it, McSwane says.
“The moment you start looking into these companies you realise this guy has a history of fraud, this person has already been debarred, etc, and you look into it and the Federal Government basically was not looking at a damn thing.”
The US had warnings early on that they’d be in trouble if a pandemic hit, McSwane says, including from medical supply company owner Mike Bowen in Texas.
“He was trying to tell the Federal Government, ‘hey, if a pandemic hits, we’re not ready and we’re going to be choked up by China’. And the moment that hit, people were like, why don’t we have masks and he’s like well I told so, and it was kind of a frustrating moment for all of America.”
There was also the constant kerfuffle between Republicans and Democrats over healthcare, from when Barack Obama came into power, which ultimately resulted in budget cuts to the agency responsible for stockpiles of PPE, he says.
“They depleted it [the stockpile] and then the Democrats agreed ‘well we need to cut things because the Republicans are making us cut things’.
“At the end of the day, we ended up with about 1 percent of what we needed when Covid hit which is really, really bad.”
So the plan became to send money out to anyone who claimed to have PPE, he says.
“That created a bonanza … but everyone realised ‘oh crap, all of this stuff is made in China’, which is holding back.
“It fuelled this bizarre market where people who had a little bit of something or claimed to have a little bit of something could get rich and more than half of them were lying, the other half were able to deliver but they were price gouging. It was a nightmare.
“Had we not put ourselves in that position, we wouldn’t have found ourselves so desperate to people like that.”
