Tag: PPE

Kushner’s Callous Conduct On Covid-19 Panel ’Flabbergasted’ Others Present

When Jared Kushner was grilled by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this week, the White House senior adviser vigorously defended President Donald Trump on a range of issues — including the president’s widely criticized response to the coronavirus pandemic. Kushner has played a key role in that response: he was put in a charge of a private sector-oriented coronavirus task force that was separate from the White House task force with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx.

And in a lengthy, in-depth article for Vanity Fair, Katherine Eban revealed some explosive details of Kushner’s coronavirus response, focusing heavily on a meeting on Friday, March 20.

Kushner was present at that meeting, which was attended by “a large group of officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency — people one attendee described as ‘the doers’ — to strategize how best to replenish the nation’s depleted reserves of PPE.” Continue reading.

Internal document reveals federal plan to ask nurses to reuse masks

Protective supplies still limited, months into the pandemic

Internal Federal Emergency Management Agency data show that the government’s supply of surgical gowns has not meaningfully increased since photos first emerged in March of nurses wearing trash bags for protection.

“The demand for gowns outpaces current U.S. manufacturing capabilities,” a document released Tuesday says.

The document confirms the fears of nurses and other health care providers. After months of pressure on federal officials to use wartime powers to mobilize U.S. plants, the document’s slides show that domestic manufacturing of gowns and surgical masks has ticked up by a few thousand per month since the pandemic hit, falling far short of need. The United States still does not manufacture any nitrile rubber gloves. Continue reading.

Administration initially dispensed scarce covid-19 drug to some hospitals that didn’t need it

Washington Post logoOfficials describe early missteps that delayed treatment to critically ill patients

The Trump administration mishandled the initial distribution of the only approved coronavirusmedication, delaying treatment to some critically ill patients with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to nine current and former senior administration officials.

The first tranche of 607,000 vials of the antiviral medication remdesivir, donated to the government by drugmaker Gilead Sciences, was distributed in early May — in some cases to the wrong hospitals, to hospitals with no intensive care units and therefore no eligible patients, and to facilities without the needed refrigeration to store it, meaning some had to be returned to the government, said the officials familiar with the distribution effort.

Demand for remdesivir soared after the National Institutes of Health announced on April 29 that a clinical trial had shown that hospitalized patients with advanced covid-19 who received the experimental drug recovered faster than similar patients who received a placebo. Two days later, the Food and Drug Administration, citing those results, approved the drug to treat severely ill patients. Continue reading.

In the early days of the pandemic, the U.S. government turned down an offer to manufacture millions of N95 masks in America

Washington Post logoIt was Jan. 22, a day after the first case of covid-19 was detected in the United States, and orders were pouring into Michael Bowen’s company outside Fort Worth, some from as far away as Hong Kong.

Bowen’s medical supply company, Prestige Ameritech, could ramp up production to make an additional 1.7 million N95 masks a week. He viewed the shrinking domestic production of medical masks as a national security issue, though, and he wanted to give the federal government first dibs.

“We still have four like-new N95 manufacturing lines,” Bowen wrote that day in an email to top administrators in the Department of Health and Human Services. “Reactivating these machines would be very difficult and very expensive but could be achieved in a dire situation.” Continue reading.

Trump becomes immediately defensive when a nurse reveals to him that medical supplies have been ‘sporadic’

AlterNet logoWhen President Donald Trump met with some health care professionals in the White House on Wednesday, a nurse pointed out that supplies of PPE (personal protective equipment) had been “sporadic” — inspiring Trump to become defensive and make some false claims about Barack Obama’s administration.

Sophia Thomas, the president of the National Association of Nurse Practitioners, told Trump and others, “PPE has been sporadic, but it’s been manageable. And we do what we have to do. We’re nurses, and we learn to adapt…. And that’s what we’re going to continue to do as COVID-19 continues.”

A defensive Trump told Thomas, “Sporadic for you, but not sporadic for a lot of other people.” Continue reading.

U.S. sent millions of face masks to China early this year, ignoring pandemic warning signs

Washington Post logoU.S. manufacturers shipped millions of dollars’ worth of face masks and other protective medical equipment to China in January and February with encouragement from the federal government, a Washington Post review of economic data and internal government documents has found. The move underscores the Trump administration’s failure to recognize and prepare for the growing pandemic threat.

In those two months, the value of protective masks and related items exported from the United States to China grew more than 1,000 percent compared with the same time last year — from $1.4 million to about $17.6 million, according to a Post analysis of customs categories which, according to research by Public Citizen, contain key personal protective equipment (PPE). Similarly, shipments of ventilators and protective garments jumped by triple digits.

“Instead of taking steps to prepare, they ignored the advice of one expert after another,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.). “People right now, as we speak, are dying because there have been inadequate supplies of PPE.” Continue reading.

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.

3M warns Trump: Halting exports under Defense Production Act would reduce number of masks available to US

3M  warned on Friday that the Trump administration’s request for the company to stop exporting respirator masks could actually make the protective gear less available in the United States.

The Minnesota manufacturing giant issued the warning a day after President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to force 3M to step up its production of desperately needed respirator masks for front-line health workers to use in the fight against the coronavirus.

The text of Trump’s order issued Thursday night directs acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to “use any and all authority available under the Act to acquire, from any appropriate subsidiary or affiliate of 3M Company, the number of N-95 respirators that the Administrator determines to be appropriate.” Continue reading.

Inside America’s mask crunch: A slow government reaction and an industry wary of liability

Washington Post logoOn March 5, as the deadly novel coronavirus was racing through the United States, Vice President Pence paid a visit to the Minnesota headquarters of 3M, the manufacturing giant that produces protective respiratory masks.

Pence, who leads the White House’s coronavirus task force, praised the company during a public roundtable for deciding at the outset of the crisis “to go to full capacity” and ramp up production of high-grade N95 masks.

With its factories in South Dakota and Nebraska cranked up and running around the clock, 3M was on pace to double its global output to nearly 100 million a month, according to the company. 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.