A Tennessee man who amassed a collection of over 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer and a variety of other sanitary supplies, such as face masks and anti-bacterial wipes, has been speaking about how he hasn’t been able to sell them since his products were delisted from the Amazon marketplace.
According to The New York Times, Matt Colvin teamed up with his brother to collect and sell pandemic supplies earlier this month, after the United States reported the first death from coronavirus.
The Times reports that the supply-run involved one brother renting a U-Haul and taking a 1,300-mile road trip to clean out stores, while Matt Colvin stayed home and listed other supplies online that he was having delivered.
Colvin told the news agency he made “crazy money,” and managed to sell 300 bottles of hand sanitizer at prices between $8 and $70 each.
“It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” Colvin told the Times, regarding his inability to sell his supplies. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”
“I’m being paid for my public service,” said Colvin. “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”
UPDATE: Seller Who Hoarded 17,000 Bottles Of Hand Sanitizer Donates Stockpile
As Entrepreneur reported earlier this week, Ebay has also banned sellers from offloading surgical masks and other forms of sanitizers due to issues with price gouging.
After the Times published the report, Colvin told the news agency he was looking into donating his stockpile to people who need it.
According to Bloomberg News, the FDA announced Saturday that it will encourage pharmacists, doctors, and other licensed healthcare professionals to produce their own hand sanitizer to meet consumer demand. The government agency has also provided guidelines to health professionals about what ingredients they should use, and in what ratios they should be used, reports the news agency.
According to Grabien, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared on MSNBC the very same day, pitching his idea for how to properly produce hand sanitizer – predictably, it involved mass-scale government intervention.
“This is a case for a nationalization, literally a nationalization of crucial factories and industries that can produce the medical supplies to prepare this country for what we need,” de Blasio told MSNBC host Joy Reid.
“The federal government should recognize this is literally a crucial part of stopping this, there should be a national approach to ensuring – every factory that can make hand sanitizer should be on 24/7 shifts and the distribution should go to the places that need it most,” continued de Blasio.
Amidst his nationalization proposal, de Blasio also inserted a jab at the president, arguing that the Trump administration was approaching a “wartime scenario with a Mar-A-Lago attitude.”
As The Daily Wire has previously reported, the Trump administration has declared a national emergency, and White House coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned Americans to prepare for the epidemic to worsen: “It’s certainly going to get worse before it gets better … there’s no doubt we have not peaked yet,” he said Friday.
Facui has declined to predict whether the United States will shut down in the vein of China and Italy, the Asian and European epicenters of the virus, respectively: “I’m not sure we’re going to get to that. I think that would be really rather dramatic, but I can tell you that all things are on the table. We just have to respond as things evolve over the days and the weeks.”