As we reported here at ResCon1, Tuesday, March 24, New York’s Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo, bears significant responsibility for his state’s lack of ventilators.
U.S. intelligence agencies and public health experts, we observed, warned Cuomo and other government officials years ago of likely pandemics that would overburden our hospitals and healthcare system.
A New York state task force, in fact, specifically warned Cuomo of the lack of ventilators during a pandemic. Cuomo, though, opted not to purchase the requisite number of ventilators.
These are all facts, not opinion or conjecture, and this a matter of public record.
What is a a matter of opinion is Cuomo’s assertion that Trump needs to “nationalize” the medical supply chain, because doing so would mean that 30,000 ventilators would suddenly be produced and descend upon New York State hospitals.
Trump, as we reported here at ResCon1, has wisely resisted Cuomo’s call to have the federal government take over the medical supply chain, because doing so would not solve anything.
Instead, nationalization would create more problems because the government is inept at running commercial businesses. That is simply not a public-sector comparative advantage.
Trump, meanwhile, hit back against Cuomo in a Fox News virtual town hall:
This [article] says that New York Governor Cuomo rejected buying recommended 16,000 ventilators in 2015 for the pandemic—for a pandemic; established death panels and a lotteries instead.
So he had a chance to buy, in 2015, 16,000 ventilators at a very low price and he turned it down.
I’m not blaming him or anything else, but he shouldn’t be talking about us. He’s supposed to be buying his own ventilators. We’re going to help.
But, you know, if you think about—if you think about Governor Cuomo, we’re building him four hospitals. We’re building him four medical centers.
We’re working very, very hard for the people of New York. We’re working along with him, and then I watch him on the show, complaining. And he had 16,000 ventilators that he could have had at a great price and he didn’t buy them.
As a result of these comments, two news organizations, The Dispatch and FactCheck.Org, have published overly long, tendentious, and convoluted criticisms of Trump for allegedly not telling the truth about Cuomo and the ventilators. But their criticisms really miss the mark and are beside the point.
FactCheck.Org flags Trump for charging that, because New York failed to purchase more ventilators years ago, it would be forced to employ a “lottery system” and “death panels” to ration the use of available ventilators. This is “misleading,” they argue.
Moreover, says FactCheck.Org, the New York State task force that looked into the matter in 2015 “did not recommend whether the state should buy more ventilators (and hire the staff necessary to operate them).”
But this is splitting hairs. As Betsy McCaughey explains in the New York Post,
In 2015, that task force came up with rules that will be imposed when ventilators run short.
Patients assigned a red code will have highest access, and other patients will be assigned green, yellow or blue (the worst), depending on a “triage officer’s” decision.
In truth, a death officer. Let’s not sugar-coat it. It won’t be up to your own doctor.
Exactly. Let’s not sugar-coat it. As for the reference to a “lottery system,” that came from a Feb. 27, 2020, New York Times article:
The task force that issued the report devised a formula, relying partially on medical criteria, to help hospitals decide who would get ventilators and who would not.
It also envisioned a lottery system in some instances. And age could play a role, with children being given preference over adults.
Rationing. But the larger-scale point, which we made here at ResCon1 is this: without more ventilators soon, ventilators will have to be rationed, and that means deciding who will live and who will die.
Call it what you will, that is a problem—a big and serious problem.
And whether the task force recommended that the state buy more ventilators is immaterial. The reality is that, as Governor of New York State, Cuomo has a responsibility to safeguard the health and safety of his people, the residents of New York. He failed.
He failed by not buying more ventilators—even though he had been warned of this problem, and even though he had been warned about the likelihood of a pandemic that would require many more ventilators.
Maybe he failed for good reason: because the tradeoffs were too difficult and too stark. Still, he failed. As governor, the buck stops with him.
The Dispatch, meanwhile, complains that “Trump provided no evidence to support his claim that Cuomo could have had the ventilators ‘at a very low price’ in 2015, and that Cuomo ‘turned it down.’”
But cost, too, is really immaterial. When it comes to public health, government has an obligation to spend whatever it takes to protect the health and well-being of their people—us.
That is a fundamental and non-negotiable obligation of the state.If government officials think the cost of public health is too high or prohibitive, then they should say so, clearly and publicly.
That way, we can openly and rationally discuss and debate the tradeoffs involved, our public policy and spending priorities, and what level of risk we, as a society, are willing to assume.
In any case, Trump was echoing what McCaughey argued in her New York Post piece. “In 2015,” she wrote,
the state could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 a piece, or a total of $576 million. It’s a lot of money, but in hindsight, spending half a percent of the budget to prepare for a pandemic was the right thing to do.
The Dispatch also gets lost in the weeds on the origins of the New York State task force and its precise findings; but this is all background noise and beside the point.
The bottom line is this: Cuomo was warned of a problem and yet, he did not act.
But what’s done is done. What matters now is: where do we go from here? How do we ramp up production and delivery of ventilators to New York and other states that are suffering most from the coronavirus?
The most obvious place to begin is with the Strategic National Stockpile, “the government reserve meant to fortify overwhelmed hospitals in a crisis.” But that stockpile has only 16,600 ventilators, reports the Center for Public Integrity—far fewer than the 64,000 to 742,000 that might be needed.
In truth, only an unleashed and unchained private sector free to innovate can possibly produce the requisite number of ventilators quickly enough to meet the anticipated demand. Fortunately the Trump administration is relaxing the regulatory burden and companies are stepping up to produce.
A company called Prisma Health, for instance, is using 3D printing to manufacture a new ventilator model that can support up to four patients simultaneously.
The company says that it “has received emergency use authorization” from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is working with “COVID-19 [treatment] teams who have no more ventilator capacity, and who can initiate emergency use of the prototype.”
The good news, reports the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn, “is that players in the private sector… have already been in touch with one another to see how they might team up.”
For example, he writes, before the coronavirus hit, one company’s “peak output was roughly 150 ventilators a month.” However, within the next 90 days, they expect to increase that to 1,000 ventilators a month.
“It won’t be easy [nor will it happen] overnight,” says Chris Kiple, “but it can be done.”
Mr. Kiple is CEO of Seattle-based Ventec Life Systems. He says Ventec is one of about a dozen players in the global market for ventilators, only about half of which are U.S.-based companies.
“Ventec,” McGurn writes, recently
announced it will work in partnership with General Motors. The idea is to combine GM’s experience of mass-production manufacturing with Ventec’s technology.
Mr. Kiple says the partnership will mean getting “more ventilators to more hospitals much faster.” The president tweeted Sunday, [March 22, 2020]: “Go for it auto execs.”
Feature photo credit: NY1