This is somewhere near the very bottom of a ranked list of US problems in this pandemic. Manufacturing takes time to significantly ramp up regardless of where it is, it’s not clear there would have been a major difference between what we did in waiting until we could buy more masks overseas vs waiting for US production to ramp up. And we had supposedly already alleviated this problem anyway with national stockpiles, except that those had not been maintained. Fixing that mistake is much easier and probably even more effective than undoing the globalization of the past few decades.

And honestly, by about April this year when China started having the virus under control and reopened their manufacturing sector at full capacity, it’s a good thing they were equipped to manufacture so many essential items. The US started running into capacity problems with some of the industries we do have like meat processing plants, if we relied more heavily on domestic manufacturing we actually would have been worse off over that period.