Ask PolitiFact: When will we be able to buy hand sanitizer again?

By early March, the COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented shortage of hand sanitizers at stores and online.

A reader asked us, when will we be able to buy hand sanitizer again? 

The short answer is, it doesn’t appear anytime soon.

"The issue is we have a huge surge in demand across all sectors, so supply cannot keep up," said Nada Sanders, a professor of supply chain management at Northeastern University.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends washing hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. If soap and water are not accessible, the CDC recommends using hand sanitizers. Hand sanitizers are especially useful when people are outside the home on necessary chores, like grocery shopping, where soap and water isn’t readily available.

Studies show hand sanitizers with at least 60% alcohol are more effective at killing germs than those with a lower alcohol concentration or none at all. Yet despite that guidance, alcohol-free hand sanitizers flew off the shelves in the United States.

RELATED: Hand sanitizer can be used to prevent coronavirus infection

A spokeswoman for GoJo, the Akron, Ohio, company that produces the hand sanitizer Purell, said the company doesn’t disclose sales or production numbers, but the company is operating around the clock. But it’s only shipping the product for hospitals, first responders and critical infrastructure, company spokeswoman Samantha Williams told PolitiFact.

Williams provided no timeline for making products available to individuals. Spokespersons for retailers like Publix and Target also had no timeline for when consumers can easily find hand sanitizer on their shelves.

"We are receiving limited quantities of hand sanitizer. As you might imagine, what we receive sells very quickly," said Maria Brous, a spokeswoman for Publix. "Like some other disinfectant-providing suppliers, production capacity has been shifted to support the health care industry." 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidance in March to allow the temporary manufacture of some alcohol-based hand sanitizer products. The federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau temporarily waived provisions of tax law to allow distilleries to produce ethanol-based hand sanitizers. 

Brad Plummer, a spokesman for the American Distilling Institute, said about 350 distilleries nationwide are now producing hand sanitizer. Distilleries are using the formula recommended by the World Health Organization. 

Individuals can contact distilleries in their area to ask if they are selling any hand sanitizer to the public, but many are selling their product to particular sectors rather than the public.

"Most distilleries are trying to get as much as they can to law enforcement and front-line health care workers," Plummer said.

Glenn Richey, a supply chain management professor at Auburn University, said "forward buying" by consumers caused a huge spike in demand. Consumers’ hoarding will likely cause businesses in the supply chain to over-forecast and then become overstocked a year from now.

"This means that newly minted manufacturers of the product may not have sufficient demand to remain in business after the panic subsides," he said. 

Many consumers have followed do-it-yourself recipes to make hand sanitizers for personal use. The FDA concluded that it lacks information to determine whether such DIY recipes are safe for use on human skin.

MediaWise, a media literacy initiative that includes student fact-checkers, fact-checked whether consumers can make their own hand sanitizer. MediaWise found that a post with instructions on homemade sanitizer needs context and that " washing your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds is the best way to stay safe." (MediaWise and PolitiFact are both owned by the Poynter Institute.)

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