New York governor Andrew Cuomo, in a press briefing today, demanded that President Trump send more ventilators to New York, saying that they needed 30,000 ventilators or people would die.
All because Trump refuses to invoke the Defense Production Act ...
Governor Cuomo: "FEMA says we're sending 400 ventilators. Really? What am I going to do with 400 ventilators when I need 30,000? You pick the 26,000 people are going to die because you only sent 400 ventilators." pic.twitter.com/ISoupZmuWM
— Minh Ngo (@minhtngo) March 25, 2020
President Trump, armed with information, shot back that Cuomo should have followed the advice he received in 2015 to buy 16,000 ventilators to prepare for a pandemic. Cuomo did not buy the ventilators and he is now seeking to direct attention away from his improvidence by accusing President Trump of dereliction of duty.
Trump fires back on Cuomo’s dereliction of duty. Failed to buy 15,000 ventilators in 2015. pic.twitter.com/sB2bvqLGGq
— Kevin McCashion 🇺🇸 (@Kevin_McCashion) March 24, 2020
Mainstream media outlets claim that the president is relying on "far-right" blogs, but the language is right there in the "New York State Department of Health and New York State Task Force on Life and the Law Update Ventilator Allocation Guidelines."
In 2015, Dr. Howard Zucker counseled Cuomo in the guidelines. "Pandemic influenza is a foreseeable threat, and New York has a responsibility to plan now."
Zucker admitted that New York did not have enough ventilators to deal with a flu pandemic, and then went on to say that if they bought more ventilators they wouldn't have the technicians to run them!
In a severe public health emergency on the scale of the 1918 influenza pandemic, however, these ventilators would not be sufficient to meet the demand. Even if the vast number of ventilators needed were purchased, a sufficient number of trained staff would not be available to operate them.
Betsy McCaughy, Lieutenant Governor under Governor George Pataki, wrote that Cuomo authorized "death" panels. She has been smeared as far-right also, but the authority to choose who will get ventilator treatment in the event of a shortage is in the New York State Task Force document, also.
All patients in need of a ventilator are subject to one of the three clinical protocols, using objective, universally-applied clinical criteria to evaluate a patient's likelihood of survival.
Patients who have the highest likelihood of survival with ventilator therapy receive priority...To ensure that patients receive the best possible care in a pandemic, the guidelines call for a triage officer or triage committee to determine who receives or continues to receive ventilator therapy. To prevent a conflict of interest, these decision-makers are not the patients' attending physicians. The decision regarding whether to use a triage officer or committee is up to each hospital, given the different resources at each site...
Patients not receiving ventilator therapy should receive alternative forms of medical intervention. Palliative care will be provided to all patients to manage patient discomfort.
Perhaps many people at this point in the coronavirus pandemic have been wondering and discussing if locking the entire country down is really necessary. Older people, the most vulnerable, are suggesting that they can self-isolate while the rest of the country gets back to work.
Others, like Dr. Anthony Fauci of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, are offering hope that increased testing will allow states to target hotspots while allowing the rest of the state to go about their business.
If we do the kind of testing that we're doing ... and you find after a period of time that there are areas that are very different from other areas of the country, you may not want to essentially treat it as one force for the entire country, but look at flexibility in different areas." Dr. Fauci
President Trump set the goal of being able to restart the world's largest economy by Easter which is April 12th. Let's hope and pray that happens.
Watch:
In today's press conference, President Trump announced that he is invoking the Defense Production Act to meet the needs the coronavirus pandemic has produced.
There is a limited supply of ventilators, masks, and protective gear needed to fight the Chinese coronavirus.
The Defense Production Act was first enacted in 1950 to ramp up supplies during the Korean War. The language in the bill allows the president to use it in the "war" against the coronavirus. The president can authorize the production of medical items like respirators, ventilators, face masks, and other items if needed during the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Lexington Institute military expert Loren Thompson,
The Defense Production Act permits the president to push national security items to the front of the line, rather than following items that were previously ordered. It exists to speed up urgently needed items."
In fact, the president said he is now a "wartime" president, identifying the enemy as Covid-19, the Chinese coronavirus.
“Now it's our time. We must sacrifice together, because we are all in this together, and we will come through together. It's the invisible enemy. That's always the toughest enemy, the invisible enemy.”
The president asked for questions after he and his various task force members finished updating the nation. The second question asked was the media's new talking point, their attempt to label the president a "xenophobe," asking if he would continue to call the virus the "Chinese" virus. The president responded that he would call it that because that is where the coronavirus originated.
Watch:
An ABC correspondent repeated the question about labeling the virus the "Chinese" coronavirus.
Can someone identify this journalist? I bet she aced 'Identifying Racism' in college! https://t.co/ZFYMdpSCCf
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 18, 2020
After listening to the reporter's comments and question one would think that President Trump was the only person who had called Covid-19 the Chinese coronavirus. It turns out that the president is simply calling the coronavirus by the same name the mainstream media called it until now.
The Media Research Center created a montage of the many times the media used the name.
Watch:
Liberal media pundits want you to think referring to the coronavirus as the "Wuhan" or "Chinese" virus is racist.
Here's just a few of the times the liberal media did just that. pic.twitter.com/ss3kV5smSP
— MRCTV.org (@mrctv) March 12, 2020