Tag: ventilators

States still baffled over how to get coronavirus supplies from Trump

Governors are trying any method they can think of — contacting FEMA, making Twitter pleas, calling Trump and going to the media.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis was pleading with the federal government to send ventilators.

The state was starting to see hundreds of new coronavirus cases pop up each day, and Polis, a Democrat, worried that hospitals wouldn’t have enough life-saving ventilators to deal with the looming spike.

So he made an official request for ventilators through the Federal Emergency Management System, which is managing the effort. That went nowhere. He wrote to Vice President Mike Pence, leader of the White House’s coronavirus task force. That didn’t work. He tried to purchase supplies himself. The federal government swooped in and bought them. Continue reading.

Hospitals face shortage of drugs for ventilators

The Hill logoHospitals are facing yet another new obstacle in the fight against the coronavirus: They are running low on the drugs needed to put patients on ventilators to keep them alive.

While much attention has been placed on the desperate hunt for more ventilators, the machines are useless unless they are accompanied by drugs to sedate patients and eliminate pain.

Now hospitals, particularly in hard-hit areas such as New York, say those drugs are getting scarce, along with the ventilators themselves. Continue reading.

Ford and GM are undertaking a warlike effort to produce ventilators. It may fall short and come too late.

Washington Post logoPresident Trump is firing the intelligence community inspector general whose insistence on telling lawmakers about a whistle-blower complaint about his dealings with Ukraine triggered impeachment proceedings last fall, the president told lawmakers in a letter late Friday.

The move came as Mr. Trump announced his intent to name a White House aide as the independent watchdog for $500 billion in corporate pandemic aid and notified Congress of other nominees to inspector general positions, including one that would effectively oust the newly named chairman of a panel to oversee how the government spends $2 trillion in coronavirus relief.

The slew of late-night announcements, coming as the world’s attention is gripped by the coronavirus pandemic, raised the specter of a White House power play over the community of inspectors general, independent officials whose mission is to root out waste, fraud and abuse within the government. Continue reading.

Trump to expand use of Defense Production Act to build ventilators

The Hill logoPresident Trump announced Thursday that he is expanding his use of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to help several manufacturers secure supplies for ventilators.

Trump issued a memorandum allowing the secretary of Health and Human Services to use authority under the powerful Korean War-era law to help six companies, including General Electric and Medtronic, secure supplies to make ventilators.

“Today’s order will save lives by removing obstacles in the supply chain that threaten the rapid production of ventilators,” Trump said in a statement. Continue reading.

A lottery for ventilators? Hospitals prepare for ethical conundrums

While some states have ethics guidelines in place, there is no national standard for who gets access to scarce life-saving machinery.

When a group of doctors, ethicists and religious leaders got together to write New York’s 2015 ethical guidelines for allocating ventilators in a pandemic, they coalesced around a clear principle: Scarce resources should go to the person most likely to be saved. But they had to contemplate another, tougher, situation: What if a number of patients were equally likely to benefit?

In that case, they decided, a lottery might be the fairest option.

The specter of such extreme rationing – a large number of critically ill patients confronting a finite supply of life-saving machinery – was grim but theoretical when debated by the philosophically minded panel. Now, as New York and other states gird for the possibility of a shortage of ventilators, that ethics roadmap could come actually into practice. Continue reading.

Cuomo pushes back on Trump over ventilators: ‘I operate on facts’

The Hill logoNew York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Friday pushed back on President Trump‘s assertion that his state does not really need thousands more ventilators to fight the coronavirus outbreak there, saying “I operate on facts.”

“Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, but I don’t operate here on opinion, I operate on facts and on data and on numbers and on projections,” Cuomo said when asked about Trump’s comments the previous night.

Trump, speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, questioned whether the state, which is at the center of the coronavirus outbreak, really needed 30,000 more ventilators, which Cuomo has been pleading for from the Trump administration. Continue reading.