Illustration: Pablo Delcan

How 3M Blew Its Reputation on the N95 Mask

The $32 billion company was known as an icon of manufacturing innovation. Then came the mask shortage—and Trump.

David H. Freedman
Published in
17 min readAug 19, 2020

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On the evening of April 2, some two weeks into America’s full-blown Covid crisis, President Donald Trump fired off a tweet to his more than 80 million followers:

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David H. Freedman
Marker

David is a Boston-based science writer. The most recent of his five books is WRONG, about the problems with medical research and other expertise.