5 Responses to “Should have been stocked up and ready”

• #1

  latsot

  April 2, 2020 at 8:25 am

  Humanitarian relief is a good thing, but so is keeping supplies ready at home during a raging pandemic.

  And surely he could have done both.
• #2

  What a Maroon

  April 2, 2020 at 9:08 am

  Heather Cox Richardson has some more details:

  Politico revealed that an administration official called counterparts in Thailand to ask for PPE only to be told by a confused official on the other end who said that the U.S. was shipping those very supplies to Thailand. One shipment had already arrived, and another was on its way. Vice President Mike Pence, who is in charge of the administration’s coronavirus task force, immediately halted the shipment. It appears that there has been no coordination between the administration and USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, so we have apparently been exporting the very supplies we need at home.

  And:

  Politico also broke the story that since March 12, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been in charge of his own coronavirus response team to get the private sector on board to fight the crisis. Trump has been reluctant to activate the Defense Production Act, a law that enables the government to encourage manufacturers to produce vital equipment and protects them from losses when they do. Bizarrely, the Trump administration—like all others since the law went into effect in the 1950s—uses this act all the time to respond to natural disasters, to move supplies around during emergencies, and so on, but refuses to do so now. Instead, it appears Trump has tapped Kushner to coordinate with private industry. In that capacity, he and his outside experts—including a number from the consulting firm McKinsey—are acting as a sort of independent cell without government oversight and are overruling the teams already in place.

  We learned that the Obama administration tried five years ago to address what it perceived as a lack of ventilators in case of a pandemic, paying $13.8 million to a Pennsylvania manufacturer—a subsidiary of a huge Dutch appliance and technology corporation– to create a cheap, easy ventilator to stockpile. The FDA cleared the device in September and the Department of Health and Human Services, which had provided the $13.8 million, ordered 10,000 of them for $3,280 each. Instead of providing those ventilators, the company instead hiked its prices and sold them overseas. Trump has declined to use the DPA to get the company to produce the ventilators it developed for the U.S. Instead, Kushner’s team is negotiating with it to build 43,000 more expensive hospital ventilators for the U.S.

  Pence tried to suggest that the administration’s slow response was because China had been slow about admitting the full extent of the disease and that the Centers for Disease Control had initially mischaracterized the danger from it as low. (While China did try to quash information about the disease, the CDC was clear about it.) Pence continued: “I don’t believe the President has ever belittled the threat of the coronavirus.” (There is overwhelming evidence Trump did exactly this.)

  And then there’s this from a Detroit journalist. It’s an image so I can’t cut and paste, but the tl;dr is that GM has been pushing forward to produce ventilators at cost, but Il Douchebag doesn’t like GM*, in part because they closed down a plant in Ohio, and so he’s effectively stopped them from producing the ventilators.

  *Not liking GM is not in itself a bad thing; in fact, it’s good not to like GM. But when they’re actually doing something that will save lives, that’s not the time to get in their way.
• #3

  guest

  April 2, 2020 at 9:31 am

  Bless you Maxine Waters. Not that anyone will notice.
• #4

  Ophelia Benson

  April 2, 2020 at 10:46 am

  Holy shit. Thanks for the info, WaM.
• #5

  guest

  April 2, 2020 at 12:28 pm

  If you’re not subscribing to Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter you’re missing out. It’s one of the highlights of my day.