--- description: Amid questions about U.S. preparedness for COVID-19, the Strategic National Stockpile is further stocking up. Here's how the stockpile began title: The Surprising Origins of the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta9eda39eea92293b/698a0b65e76ad286976375e1/mask.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [History](/section/history/) ## History Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [politics](/tag/politics/) ## politics Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # Coronavirus Is Putting the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile to the Test. Here’s the Surprising Story Behind the Stash  by [Olivia B. Waxman](/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Staff Writer Mar 11, 2020 3:23 PM CUT  N95 masks rest on a cart of filled with protective gear that must be worn when dealing with patients with an infectious disease as Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston prepares for a possible surge in coronavirus patients on Feb. 27, 2020. N95 masks rest on a cart of filled with protective gear that must be worn when dealing with patients with an infectious disease as Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston prepares for a possible surge in coronavirus patients on Feb. 27, 2020.Erin Clark—The Boston Globe/Getty Images  by [Olivia B. Waxman](/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Staff Writer Mar 11, 2020 3:23 PM CUT Amid questions about whether the U.S. has enough medical supplies to confront the spread of COVID-19, the [Strategic National Stockpile](https://time.com/5800200/strategic-national-stockpile-coronavirus/ "undefined") — the nation’s emergency pharmacy and medical supplies stash — is further stocking up, recently ordering 500 million N95 respirator masks. If that news is starting to sound like [something out of science fiction](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/movies/contagion-movie-coronavirus.html "undefined") to you, well, you wouldn’t be far off. As Ali S. Khan, a former head of the agency that oversees the stockpile, points out to TIME, it was a novel about a virus that, two decades ago, helped guide President Bill Clinton’s thinking about how prepared the U.S. was, in real life, for an infectious disease outbreak. The result of that thinking was the Strategic National Stockpile. In the novel — Richard Preston’s _The Cobra Event,_ published Oct. 21, 1997 — a 29-year-old Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pathologist hunts for the cause of a virus, nicknamed Cobra, that was [manufactured](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-679-45714-5 "undefined") by a mad scientist-cum-terrorist and is spreading throughout New York City. Victims first come down with common cold symptoms that morph into a “brainpox” in which “otherwise decorous human beings to gobble their bottom lips, bite off their own fingers, and in extreme cases to ‘enucleate’ themselves (remove one’s own eyeball) spontaneously,” per the New York _Times_ [review](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/reviews/971102.02harrist.html "undefined") back then. Preston’s 1994 nonfiction book _The Hot Zone_, and the 1995 Dustin Hoffman movie it inspired, _Outbreak,_ had already [raised public awareness](https://time.com/3318178/ebola/ "undefined") of Ebola. Now, Preston was doing the same for bioterrorism. While the plausibility of a virus like Cobra existing was [swiftly debunked](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400280/science-fiction-policy/ "undefined"), fears about national emergency preparedness were very real. “In April 1998, as a result of having read the Richard Preston novel, _The Cobra Event,_ the president held a meeting with a group of scientists and Cabinet members to discuss the threat of bioterrorism,” the scholar Martha Crenshaw [wrote](https://books.google.com/books?id=kdGlbkQm5bgC&pg=PA186&dq=the.cobra.event+clinton&lr=&sig=dRzt13PvS9%5F8hNc9ZyRAxIWke6I#v=onepage&q=the.cobra.event%20clinton&f=false "undefined") in a 2006 terrorism-studies anthology. “The briefing impressed Clinton so much that he asked the experts to brief senior officials in DOD and HHS.” Crenshaw cites a May 21, 1998, Washington _Post_ article noting that, while the U.S. had stockpiles of antibiotics for military troops, there was no such stash for civilians — and that some Washington officials “expressed surprise at how fast the president and his National Security Council staff had moved” to change that. By Oct. 21, 1998, Clinton [signed into law](https://www.congress.gov/105/plaws/publ277/PLAW-105publ277.pdf "undefined") a roughly $51 million budget for “for pharmaceutical and vaccine stockpiling activities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” Its [first order of business](https://www.phe.gov/newsroom/video-descriptions/Pages/sns-20yrs-alttext.aspx "undefined") was to prepare for [Y2K](https://time.com/5752129/y2k-bug-history/ "undefined"), in the event a computer glitch disrupted medical supply chains. [_Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter_](http://time.com/newsletter-history "undefined") In a Jan. 21, 1999, Oval Office interview with the New York _Times_, two days after highlighting bioterrorism prep in his State of the Union address, Clinton said that germ warfare “keeps me awake at night,” and noted that it wasn’t just a novel that got him thinking about preparedness. Several real-world incidents in the ’90s had also made him aware of the need to boost the nation’s emergency preparedness programs. Those incidents ranged from terrorist attacks on American embassies in Africa and the Middle East and [the first World Trade Center bombing](http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19930308,00.html "undefined") in 1993 to the [Oklahoma City bombing](https://time.com/3822868/oklahoma-city-bombing-20-years/ "undefined") and the [sarin attack](https://time.com/3742241/tokyo-subway-attack-1995/ "undefined") in the Tokyo subway in 1995. And yet Preston’s novel proved a valuable lens through which Clinton Cabinet members could discuss the administration’s ramped up emergency preparedness efforts. In a February 1999 [article](https://books.google.com/books?id=1E-EBV5TE3cC&pg=PA492&lpg=PA492&dq=%22the+cobra+event%22+%22national+stockpile%22&source=bl&ots=58su5FGut-&sig=ACfU3U0tOENg-tBnekqvwNEIJyD7bzokWg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjF-YrQu5DoAhVmhXIEHcK7BPkQ6AEwAHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22the%20cobra%20event%22%20%22national%20stockpile%22&f=false "undefined") for the first National Symposium on Medical and Public Health Response to Bioterrorism, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala led off with the book, arguing that it “raises a logical question: How do we successfully contain and combat the threat of bioterrorism?” One answer, she said, is “We are creating, and will be maintaining, an unprecedented national stockpile of drugs and vaccines for civilian use in case of a bioterrorist attack.” But in TIME’s Nov. 8, 1999, special issue on “questions for the new century”, Richard Preston himself [noted](https://time.com/vault/issue/1999-11-08/spread/88/ "undefined") that bioterrorism wasn’t the only reason to worry about preparedness for a virus. After all, a virus could do the terrorizing on its own, he noted. “Viruses are moving into the human species because there are more of us all the time. From a virus’ point of view, we look like a free lunch that’s getting bigger….” he wrote. “Now wire the bombs together. People travel rapidly by air plane, carrying diseases with them as they fly. The human species has become a biological Internet with fast connections. The bionet will will get faster in the next century — that is, more people will travel by air more often, increasing the speed at which diseases move. If a tropical megacity gets hit with a new virus, New York City and Los Angeles will see it days or weeks later.” As the nation and the world face COVID-19, the warnings of two decades ago seem timelier than ever. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5800393/coronavirus-national-stockpile-history/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5800393/coronavirus-national-stockpile-history/"},"headline":"Coronavirus Is Putting the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile to the Test. 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