New tRump F*ck-Up - Thousands of Govt Ventilators Do NOT Work!

[Truman62]

Yup, good old "dealmaker Donnie" let the maintenance contracts lapse, so nobody was there to make sure they were working properly.

Just another indication of how incompetent this Administration of lying amateurs is!


President Donald Trump has repeatedly assured Americans that the federal government is holding 10,000 ventilators in reserve to ship to the hardest-hit hospitals around
the nation as they struggle to keep the most critically ill patients alive.

But what federal officials have neglected to mention is that an additional 2,109 lifesaving devices are unavailable after the contract to maintain the government’s stockpile
lapsed late last summer, and a contracting dispute meant that a new firm did not begin its work until late January. By then, the coronavirus crisis was already underway.

The revelation came in response to inquiries to the Department of Health and Human Services after state officials reported that some of the ventilators they received were
not operational, stoking speculation that the administration had not kept up with the task of maintaining the stockpile.

In fact, the contract with a company that was maintaining the machines expired at the end of last summer, and a contract protest delayed handing the job to Agiliti, a
Minneapolis-based provider of medical equipment services and maintenance. Agiliti was not given the $38 million task until late January, when the scope of the global
coronavirus crisis was first becoming clear.

It is not known whether problems with the ventilators predated the contract lapse, but maintenance of the machines did halt. That delay may become a potentially deadly
lapse.

“We were given a stop-work order before we’d even started,” said Tom Leonard, the chief executive of Agiliti, which had won the contract to service the ventilators in the
stockpile. “Between the time of the original and the time of this contract award, I don’t know who was responsible or if anybody was responsible for those devices. But it was
not us.”

Leonard said confidentiality agreements with the government over the stockpile prohibited him from giving specific figures on the number of ventilators the company was now
working on.

“We still have that first tranche of ventilators, although we’re accelerating the work to get them deployable,” Leonard said. “We haven’t seen or touched or had anything to do
with the ones that have already been deployed to date.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ventilator-stockpile-one-hitch-thousands-122048836.html