The White House's Coronavirus Task Force has been working "around the clock" to make sure the nation's hospitals have the masks, medical supplies, ventilators, and the support they need to fight the disease, and the federal stockpiles have been opened for the states' response, Vice President Mike Pence said in a Fox News virtual town hall Tuesday afternoon.
"The way we respond to health crises in this country is, as FEMA's mission describes, it's locally executed," Pence said. "The healthcare workers, at times law enforcement on the ground, community officials that are in the lead. It is state-managed, and it's federally supported."
FEMA made the administration's first Defense Production Act request on Tuesday for 60,000 ventilators, and Pence said Americans would be inspired by both President Donald Trump's leadership and the response of American businesses.
"The reality is, though, whether it be masks, tens of millions are being produced with spun-up production at companies like 3M and Honeywell," said Pence. "Even Hanes has stepped forward to manufacture masks ... every time we've asked American industry to step forward, they've said yes. No one has said no yet. We are working now through the structure of FEMA through managing the supply chain at FEMA to make sure we are harnessing the full energy of the American government."
Meanwhile, the national stockpile, as we indicated, has some 20,000 ventilators, said Pence, which are being made available to California, Seattle, and New York, the latter of which has become the "epicenter of the coronavirus" epidemic in the United States.
"The American people should understand and be encouraged to know that, when it comes to ventilators, when people reach a point with the coronavirus where they have severe respiratory struggles, that there are, by most accounts, more than 150,000 respirators and hospitals and clinics across the country today," said Pence.
In addition, anesthesiologists have a piece of equipment used for outpatient surgery that can be converted to respirators, said Pence.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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