Don’t worry. The Trump administration’s solution will probably entail making all those lazy laid-off people who will receive stimulus checks to come into clinics and hospitals and use much cheaper fireplace billows to manually ventilate patients.
It’s a consideration if it means the existing players in the industry get out of the ventilator business. Where will we be when these 80,000 ventilators reach end of life? Who will be there to supply new ones? Perhaps, if 80,000 ventilators are built under this project, perhaps they should be stored in the Strategic Ventilator Reserve when the COVID-19 emergency ends. That, at least, avoids flooding the market.
Let’s be fair here. They are willing to do this should he give the legal order. But the chickenshit only wants to bluster and have other people solve his problems for him without doing even the minimum amount of work involved in signing a document.
When I saw this tweet, my first thought was: Isn’t that what the Defense Production Act is for?
He could either invoke the DPA and make it happen, or he can go on Twitter and bang his tiny fists in impotent rage. He chose the easy way, obviously, unsurprisingly.
I thought the NYT had “unpaywalled” all of their articles relating to the corona virus.
He thinks he’s Pharaoh. Didn’t you see The Ten Commandments? “So shall it be written; so shall it be done!”
Let’s see. My father was an engineer and both of my older brothers are engineers. Going by trumpian logic, that means I’m immensely qualified to make comments on engineering issues, right?
Ventilators and automobiles are completely different things. It might not even be possible to retool their factories without emptying the places and building all new machines from the ground up.
Isn’t there anyone in that jackass’s orbit who will tell him, “You’ve already proven you’re a complete fuckup. You don’t need to hammer that point home on a daily basis while people are fucking dying because of you”?
GM has already announced they are or will soon be ready to start producing up to 10000 ventilators a month, with first shipment (of less than 10000) in a month. But they’re not talking about re-opening a defunct plant like Trump said. They figured out the important bits themselves and let their engineers take the lead, partnering with Ventec (who actually are experts in respiratory devices), and getting approvals from the FDA. He’s just talking out his ass, as usual.
They’re also going to start mass producing surgical masks.
The real problem is he balked at the $1 Billion cost. GM claims they’ll do it at cost (and that $1 billion figure for 80000 ventilators seems legitimate given the market price for so many is higher than that), so it was Trump being Trump again. Considering he just signed a $2 Trillion bill, the numeracy is low with that one.
The cherry on top is he once again spouted lies about how fast GM claimed they could produce them and tried to blame them again for, I dunno, not giving them away for free or magically producing 100000 on the spot.