In March and April 2020, as the pandemic spread, face masks, respirators and ventilators suddenly became some of the most fought-over goods on earth. Governments that normally call each other allies accused one another of outbidding, blocking and even “piracy”. Some of those accusations held up. Others fell apart within a day. This is a guide to what actually happened in the so-called “war of the masks”, and what it taught the world about emergency supplies.
The short version: demand for protective equipment exploded at the same moment that factories, mostly in Asia, could not keep up, and many countries responded by restricting exports and scrambling for whatever stock was left. The result was a few weeks of open diplomatic friction between the United States, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Spain and Turkey.
Why masks became a battleground
Before 2020, surgical masks and N95 or FFP2 respirators were cheap, unglamorous items bought in bulk by hospitals. Supply chains were global and lean. When the coronavirus reached Europe and North America, every health system wanted far more of them at once.
Production could not double overnight. China, the largest manufacturer, had already begun keeping N95 masks, gloves and other gear for domestic use in January 2020. In the following weeks the United Kingdom, France, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, India and others also limited or banned exports of medical supplies, sometimes cancelling orders that had already been placed. Germany, for example, held back hundreds of thousands of masks bound for Switzerland before the European Union moved to coordinate.
In that climate, any shipment that changed hands at the last minute looked suspicious. Prices rose sharply, middlemen multiplied, and buyers paying cash upfront had an advantage. Quality was also a problem: the Netherlands recalled 600,000 masks in late March because they did not fit properly, and Poland later reported that a large share of one delivery lacked European certification.
Germany and the “modern piracy” claim
The most famous accusation came from Berlin. On 3 April 2020 the city-state’s interior senator, Andreas Geisel, said that roughly 200,000 FFP2 masks intended for the Berlin police had been seized at Bangkok airport and redirected to the United States. He called it “an act of modern piracy” and said there should be no “wild west methods”, even in a global crisis.
The story travelled around the world within hours, but it did not survive scrutiny. The US embassy in Bangkok said Washington had taken no action to divert any shipment to Germany. The manufacturer 3M told Reuters it had no evidence that any of its products had been seized. The next day Geisel’s own office stepped back, explaining that the masks had been ordered through a German wholesaler rather than directly from 3M, and that it was still trying to work out what had gone wrong. President Donald Trump said there had been “no act of piracy”.
What really happened to those masks has never been clearly established. The episode is best understood as a sign of how tense and confusing the market had become, not as proof that one government hijacked another’s cargo.
Italy, Spain and Turkey
Turkey, which has a sizeable textile and medical manufacturing sector, was at the centre of two disputes with European countries.
Masks for Italy held at customs
In March 2020 Italy’s Corriere della Sera reported that more than 200,000 masks bought from Turkish companies for Italian hospitals had been sitting at customs in Ankara for around two weeks. Italy had already paid about €670,000 for them. According to the report, officials kept asking for new paperwork, and a promise to settle the issue quickly had not been kept. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte raised the matter in a phone call with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Italy was then the hardest-hit country in Europe, which made the delay especially painful.
Ventilators for Spain
In early April, Spanish media reported that Turkey had “seized” a shipment of medical equipment bought by Spanish regions. The facts were more nuanced. Turkey had stopped granting export licences for medical devices so it could keep equipment for its own patients, and that freeze caught an order of 116 ventilators worth about €3 million, purchased from a Turkish firm by Castilla-La Mancha and Navarra.
On 4 April Turkey authorised the export. Spain’s foreign minister, Arancha González Laya, publicly thanked her Turkish counterpart, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, and called Turkey “a friend and ally”. She also described the earlier talk of a seizure as unfair and inaccurate. So the Spanish case ended in a release and a public thank-you, not a lasting row.
Canada and the US export order
The sharpest clash between neighbours came over the US decision to keep N95 respirators at home. In early April President Trump used the Defense Production Act, a 1950 law, to stop exports of these masks. 3M, the largest US maker, warned publicly that cutting off Canada and Latin America would have “significant humanitarian implications” and could invite retaliation that would shrink supplies in the United States itself.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said US officials had stopped three million 3M masks from reaching his province, which he said had only about a week of critical protective equipment left. He was told that 500,000 of them would be released. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a calmer public line, pointing out that trade ran both ways: Canada supplies the US with pulp used to make surgical-grade N95 masks, along with test kits and gloves, and many Canadian nurses work in American hospitals.
On 6 April 3M announced a deal with the White House. The company would bring in 166.5 million respirators over three months, mostly from its plant in China, for US health workers, and in return it could keep sending US-made respirators to Canada and Latin America.
At the same time, the US was changing its advice to the public. In early April 2020 the CDC began recommending cloth face coverings in public places, while asking people to leave surgical masks and N95 respirators for health workers. That shift added even more pressure on supplies of every kind of mask.
France: cash on the tarmac
French regional leaders told a similar story of being outbid. Jean Rottner, president of the Grand Est region, one of the first French areas to be badly hit, told the French broadcaster RTL that shipments were changing hands at the last moment, with American buyers allegedly paying several times the agreed price, in cash, on airport runways. Valérie Pécresse, head of the Paris region, said she had lost an order to a country with deeper pockets but did not name it.
These claims were never independently documented in detail, and the French government said only that it was checking them. One official’s shrug summed up the mood: in a seller’s market, the highest bidder wins. Whether the buyers were US government agents, private brokers or speculators was often unclear.
Brazil’s health minister reportedly made a similar complaint about lost orders in the same weeks, which is part of why the scramble was widely described as “wild west” buying.
What the mask war taught us
Looking back, a few lessons stand out.
- Lean supply chains break under shock. Holding almost no reserve stock saved money for years, then left hospitals exposed when demand spiked overnight.
- Export bans spread quickly. Once a few producing countries restricted sales, others felt they had to follow, which made shortages worse for everyone.
- First reports are often wrong. The Berlin “piracy” story and the Spanish “seizure” both changed significantly within a day or two. Waiting for confirmation is wise in any crisis.
- Quality matters as much as quantity. Rushed purchases led to recalls and wasted money in several countries.
- Cooperation pays. The 3M deal and the release of Spain’s ventilators showed that negotiation, not accusation, got equipment moving again.
Since 2020 many governments, including the European Union with its rescEU stockpile, have invested in strategic reserves and local production, so that the next emergency does not start with allies bidding against one another on an airport runway.
Sources: Anadolu Agency on Geisel’s piracy claim; Reuters via Ahram Online on the US and 3M denials; Proto Thema citing Corriere della Sera; Anadolu Agency on the Spanish ventilators; AP via Manufacturing.net on the 3M agreement; Wikipedia: Shortages related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo: Euronews.
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