Ok this one shocked me. One keeps thinking shock has become impossible but they pull the football away again.

The official government webpage for the Strategic National Stockpile was altered Friday to seemingly reflect a controversial description of the emergency repository that White House adviser Jared Kushner offered at a news conference Thursday evening.

According to a brief online summary on the Department of Health and Human Services website, the stockpile’s role “is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well.”

But just hours earlier, the text characterized the stockpile as the “nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.”

So the feds are changing wording and policy to keep up with the ignorant and abusive claims of Jared fucking Kushner.

The previous language stated that when “state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”

Also stripped from the new summary is sentence that affirmed the stockpile “contains enough supplies to respond to multiple large-scale emergencies simultaneously.”

In other words it’s not (or it wasn’t) a matter of “these are ours and we don’t have to share them if you don’t ask nicely,” it was a matter of “these are all of ours, for use in emergencies.” They’ve changed it now to agree with the selfish petulant remarks of a sleazy landlord.

The revisions come after Kushner argued at the White House coronavirus task force press briefing Thursday that the stockpile’s reserves are the property of the federal government.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” he said. “So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local situations, and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them.”

That “we’ve” is interesting – Kushner framing himself as the federal government. He shouldn’t even have a job in his wife’s father’s administration, because Congress passed a law against that kind of nepotism after Kennedy made his brother Attorney General. Furthermore he has zero qualifications for any such job. Robert Kennedy was at least a lawyer.

Congress authorized the creation of the national stockpile in the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness Response Act, which passed in 2002, nine months after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.

The legislation orders the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “maintain a stockpile or stockpiles of drugs, vaccines and other biological products, medical devices, and other supplies … to provide for the emergency health security of the United States.”

The secretary, the law says, must also “devise plans for the effective and timely supply-chain management of the stockpile, in consultation with appropriate Federal, State and local agencies, and the public and private health care infrastructure.”

This doesn’t translate to “fight with governors and accuse them of stealing supplies.”