Trump keeps saying Obama left him ‘no ventilators.’ The number is 16,660.

The president certainly has been offering a relatively consistent message — when the coronavirus pandemic struck, there were “no ventilators,” “none” or “very few,” and those few were “obsolete.”

Those phrases suggest the number of ventilators left behind by the Obama administration in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) was zero.

So we were a bit surprised when Vice President Pence wrote in the Wall Street Journal on June 16: “The Strategic National Stockpile hadn’t been refilled since the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, and it had only 10,000 ventilators on hand.” Continue reading.