Posted on 04/05/2020 11:57:40 AM PDT by artichokegrower
Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tried to plug a crucial hole in its preparations for a global pandemic, signing a $13.8 million contract with a Pennsylvania manufacturer to create a low-cost, portable, easy-to-use ventilator that could be stockpiled for emergencies.
(Excerpt) Read more at motherjones.com ...
Would appreciate help any info on this. Had to resort to lefty Mother Jones for any background. President Bush prior to leaving office ordered a federal stockpile of ventilators. Obama contracted with a company in 2009 to manufacture 40,000 of them. In 2014 the company had made zero. A new company made a bid but it took the Obama FDA five years to approve the design. The Dutch appliance and technology giant Royal Philips N.V. purchased the design rights for the ventilators and raised the price form $3,200 to $18,000 and are selling them world wide ignoring the USA demand. Lotta corruption coming out of the previous administration.
Newport Medical Instruments has since been acquired by Covidien.
Likely the FDA didn’t like it enough to approve it as they didn’t get enough graft in return.
Please check your private messages.
We’re not going to have a problem with ventilators. We’ve got close to 200K available!
“Supply of mechanical ventilators in U.S. acute care hospitals: Based on a 2009 survey of AHA hospitals, U.S. acute care hospitals are estimated to own approximately 62,000 full-featured mechanical ventilators.10,11 Approximately 46% of these can be used to ventilate pediatric and neonatal patients. Additionally, some hospitals keep older models for emergency purposes. Older models, which are not full featured but may provide basic functions, add an additional 98,738 ventilators to the U.S. supply.10 The older devices include 22,976 noninvasive ventilators, 32,668 automatic resuscitators, and 8567 continuous positive airway pressure units.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) and other ventilator sources: The SNS has an estimated 12,700 ventilators for emergency deployment, according to recent public announcements from National Institutes of Health officials.12 These devices are also not full featured but offer basic ventilatory modes. In simulation testing they performed very well despite long-term storage.13 Accessing the SNS requires hospital administrators to request that state health officials ask for access to this equipment. SNS can deliver ventilators within 24-36 hours of the federal decision to deploy them. States may have their own ventilator stockpiles as well.14 Respiratory therapy departments also rent ventilators from local companies to meet either baseline and/or seasonal demand, further expanding their supply. Additionally, many modern anesthesia machines are capable of ventilating patients and can be used to increase hospitals’ surge capacity.
The addition of older hospital ventilators, SNS ventilators, and anesthesia machines increases the absolute number of ventilators to possibly above 200,000 units nationally. Many of the additional and older ventilators, however, may not be capable of sustained use or of adequately supporting patients with severe acute respiratory failure. Also, supplies for these ventilators may be unavailable due to interruptions in the international supply chain. Alternatively, ventilator manufacturers could be encouraged to rapidly produce modern full-featured ventilators to allow experienced clinicians to use supplemental ventilators that are familiar to them and can be readily incorporated into the hospital ventilator fleet and informatics systems. An analysis of the literature suggests, however, that U.S. hospitals could absorb a maximum of 26,000 to 56,000 additional ventilators at the peak of a national pandemic, as safe use of ventilators requires trained personnel.15”
https://sccm.org/Blog/March-2020/United-States-Resource-Availability-for-COVID-19
Sure they raised the price from $3200. to $18,000. How else were they gonna get the money to kick back to Omuzzie?
Click on the keywords I plugged in and you’ll get lots of preposted articles on this and related info.
Given the source - Mother Jones - I have to expect that there are more parts to the story than Mother Jones is reporting.
This deal would have happened under obama’s Sylvia Mathews Burwell. It may have originated under Kathleen Sebelius. Either way, they cut a bad deal for the American taxpayers. They should be investigated to make sure they don’t have any ties to the company. Same for others within the obama administration.
Don't know whether this company actually developed ‘good’, clinically viable small ventilators, but it is possible that they never produced a product of sufficient quality to sell in the US, and thus starting selling overseas.
bookmark.
Thanks for the info. Will take awhile to go through. What I have read seems to confirm my suspicions of the corruption and incompetence during the Obama administration
I usually don’t read anything from the NYT, but this gives a pretty good timeline and picture of another government failure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-ventilator-shortage.html
From the article: “In 2015, Covidien was sold for $50 billion to another huge medical device company, Medtronic.”
The latest development in this is that Medtronic published the design and specs for the ventilators that the taxpayers paid for and never received. So at least some other companies can now produce them. More on that here:
Here’s another article: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-paid-royal-philips-nv-millions-ventilators-unavailable-national-stockpile-2020-3
The contract was signed in 2014.
FDA approved the ventilator in July 2019.
HHS ordered 10,000 ventilators in September 2019.
The contract required the order to be filled by August 2020.
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