Posted on 03/13/2020 10:41:05 PM PDT by rintintin
Thursday night Seema Verma, one of the top members of the White House coronavirus task force and the current head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, repeatedly dodged when Fox News’ Martha MacCallum grilled her over possible ventilator shortages.
Tucker Carlson was so stunned by that exchange he invited Verma on his show Friday night and opened by saying, “I watched that exchange last night, and I must be honest with you, I was really troubled by it. Because you were asked a direct question by Martha MacCallum, ‘do we have enough ventilators in ICU units,’ and you appeared to intentionally not answer it, so I’m going to ask you that question again and hope that we will be reassured by the answer. Do we have enough ventilators to treat a surge in cases coronavirus right now, do you believe?”
“We have stockpile of ventilators. So right now today we are able to address people that need ventilators,” Verma said. “Our strategy though is to not make the situation worse, but there is a stockpile of ventilators. The president talked about ventilators today and said we’re going to purchase more to make sure that we have that backup supply.”
Carlson pressed on specifics, asking, “Can you put some meat on those bones and give us a sense of how many ventilators are in place? How many are in the stockpile? How many do you think we will need?”
(Excerpt) Read more at mediaite.com ...
exactly- saw the show- Tucker’s next guest was appalled by her evasive non answers-
she probably doesn’t know and why should she....does she know how many IV poles are available or cpap machines?
“Sounds like she didn’t want to answer candidly, which is scary.”
.......
She has not idea, a bureaucrat.
I disagree with Tucker on this one. How many is enough? 326,000,000? If you have less than that do you have enough? We have what we have, they are doing everything in their power to see to it the virus is kept to a minimum.
A diversity hire?
She is in charge of Medicare. How can anyone know if there are enough?
I agree she probably doesn’t know how many ventilators we have or how many will be needed. There probably was no good answer, I wouldn’t give one either.
By doing estimates? Is this difficult?
She was nominated for her position by the Obama Administration but not confirmed by the Senate until March 2017 after Trump took office. I’d keep a careful eye on this one for the possibilities of SUBTLE SABOTAGE.
And, I agree, she was quite dodgy.
It’s so scary! Not enough ventilators! Good grief! Nobody knows how many ventilators you will need if the number of infections gets into the thousands. There’s probably at least a thousand ventilators in the country. We don’t even have a total of a thousand people in critical condition let alone needing ventilators.
The worst case scenario is everybody dies. Best case nobody dies. We are already not getting best case scenario because of the octogenarians in Washington state. But if you work in media there is no money in best case scenarios. Even Tucker Carlson is getting breathless over the possibility of a worst case scenario. News makes money if stores run out of toilet paper and bottled water. But guess what? Truckers are still trucking. There must be something in all those trucks.
There is no way anyone can predict the demand for these ventilators. Ventilators are used for patients who have gone into an area of the infection where they are having difficulty breathing. How do you predict how many will be in this situation at one time? The rise and fall of those affected would be like predicting the weather. In the case of a virus epidemic, we do not have great experience in such predictions. There are too many variables that do not have the science to make those predictions.
This reminds me of the wild purchase of trailers for the Katrina disaster. We had all those trailers and they were never occupied. Someone made a prediction and it was way off.
Why are hospitals running out of gowns, gloves & masks? Does the federal government control their budgets?
Get a grip - states screwed this up - by taking control of hospital budgets and limiting competition.
Since when did it become a federal responsibility to stockpile every single item a hospital might possibly need in an emergency?
Good Job Tucker, but she still didn’t answer.
Tell her to go get some estimates and then come back on the show and answer the question.
How many ventilators do hospitals have?
How many ventilators in the national stockpile?
How many ventilators have been ordered?
How quickly can they be supplied?
What’s the vendor’s inventory?
If we use up the vendor’s inventory, how many can they produce a week?
Are there alternatives or cheaper versions that could be produced in mass?
>> which is scary.
Scary? Whatever “enough” might be, it’s not enough.
“Do we have enough...” is a ridiculous, open-ended question.
but Tucker... what ARE ventilators anyway? Can anyone really know?
I cannot get Tucker streaming via You tube anymore. Does anyone have a link to watch his show? I’ve not had a TV for over a decade.
It’s one of those questions you’d expect an asshole to ask.
I like both Martha & Tucker, but it’s pointless, antagonistic question.
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