Mother Jones illustration; Getty
With the impact of Donald Trump’s bevy of tariffs on foreign goods—including Covid protective gear—around the corner, Covid Safe Colorado knew it needed more masks to ride the wave. The organization, which has distributed masks and tests across the state since 2023, was able to arrange an order for hundreds of thousands of masks from supplier Concentric Health Alliance—paying only shipping costs—through a negotiation that ran from March to April and will supply it for the foreseeable future.
A majority of respirators—high-quality masks that function better than surgical masks for protection from airborne diseases—are imported from China, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics—and as the Trump administration moves to limit Covid vaccine access, masks will play an even more crucial role in minimizing the spread of the disease.
After months of negotiation, flip-flops, shock announcements, and market chaos, Trump’s tariffs against China are still active, mostly at 30 percent. That’s lower than the president’s earlier threats of China tariffs north of 100 percent—but still a huge figure that guarantees disruption for manufacturers and buyers. After a court ruling in late May, the tariffs briefly looked to be blocked, but a federal appeals court allowed them to continue the next day.
“To be honest, the chaos isn’t surprising,” said Katrina, Covid Safe Colorado’s co-founder, “as this administration creates it at every turn.” But organizers with mask blocs, they said—which provide PPE and other Covid-related services at the community level—are “already those types of people with sentinel intelligence that are looking five steps ahead.” (Katrina, like other organizers interviewed for this article, asked to be identified by first name only.) Sox, an organizer with Mask Bloc OKC in the Oklahoma City area, is one of several who still expects “shortages or price increases that make the masks that are most popular inaccessible.”
“We’ve developed our own DIY logistics network.”
Mask blocs began to be formed in 2020, early in the Covid pandemic, to address trouble affording PPE among low-income people, who are more vulnerable to developing Long Covid and more likely to be exposed in work and other settings. Around 150 other such groups exist across the country; they tend to have a high proportion of organizers who are chronically ill and disabled, and who face greater risks of Covid complications. And their reach and benefits go beyond the pandemic: Earlier this year, mask blocs in Los Angeles filled in the gap left by local governments by providing high-quality masks to protect locals from wildfire smoke. Other mask blocs I spoke with, including Covid Safe Colorado, similarly provide masks for environmental disasters.
Many mask blocs will work together to take advantage of economies of scale, including by pooling resources to gather large quantities of masks through auctions, says Celeste of Charlotte Mask Bloc, which operates in North Carolina, the only state to legislate a statewide mask ban.
“Since we’ve—we, the larger network of mask blocs—developed our own DIY logistics network, we can expand and contract our activities quickly based on current conditions,” Celeste said. “This is all possible because we aren’t selling masks and don’t have to make sure that every mask makes a profit. We just buy and give away as we have the resources.”
“Part of the strategy of this administration is to exhaust us and overwhelm us and to confuse us.”
But Celeste, like other organizers, has been concerned about the effect of a tariff-driven economic squeeze on the donations that keep mask blocs afloat. “People who tend to support us are people who will be more affected by the entire economic problem that’s occurring,” Celeste said. “We need to find more support, just broadly for that reason, because our mask bloc members tend to be more poor.”
Another problem facing mask bloc organizers: hostility around masking, which can be especially prominent in conservative areas: “I get coughed on or harassed 10 out of 10 times when I leave my house,” says Sox, in the Oklahoma City metro area.
While the organizers I spoke with are confident that they will weather the storm, worries remain. Covid Safe Colorado and Charlotte Mask Bloc have faced challenges keeping up their inventory of masks for children, one of the goals of the former group’s recent large buy.
Kiki, an organizer with Tucson Mask Bloc—which stocked up on masks as early as January in anticipation of Trump administration chaos—says that one tenet of her organization is to work on “crip time,” a term in some disabled communities that involves, in part, finding ways not to respond to news like tariffs, vaccine restrictions, and mask bans with constant, immense urgency.
“We’re really trying to be thoughtful about just taking a deep breath,” Kiki said, “and knowing that part of the strategy of this administration is to exhaust us and overwhelm us and to confuse us.”