President Trump said he was pushing manufacturers to produce 100,000 ventilators in the next 100 days to meet the needs of hospitals around the world as he resorted to wartime powers to escalate the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic.
He invoked the Defense Production Act on Friday to compel General Motors to begin producing the life-saving breathing machines and signed an executive order to mobilize military medical reservists.
Trump has described himself as a wartime president fighting an unseen enemy, and the two moves suggested a new phase in the battle as cases of COVID-19 increase across the nation.
“Ventilators are a big deal,” he said.
A day earlier, however, he apparently dismissed an appeal from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for 30,000 machines during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity, suggesting that hospitals were making exaggerated demands.
“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” he said Thursday during the daily White House coronavirus briefing.
Friday, he said a new urgency would see GM producing 10,000 a month starting in April. He said the company had not been able to come to a voluntary arrangement with the federal government and demanded too high a price, so it was being compelled.
“This invocation of the DPA should demonstrate to all that we will not hesitate to use the full authority of the federal government to combat this crisis,” he said. “We thought we had a deal with, as an example, General Motors, and I guess they thought otherwise. They didn’t agree, and now they do.”
Ventilators have become one of the key stress points in a healthcare system in danger of being overwhelmed by patients who desperately need the life-saving equipment.
He again said he believed hospital demands were too high but added that unused ventilators would go to other countries, including the United Kingdom where Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tested positive for COVID-19.
“If we don’t need them, that’s OK because we can help Italy, and we can help U.K., Boris Johnson specifically,” he said.
“When I say, ‘How you feeling?’ and the first thing Boris said to me is, ‘We need ventilators.”
“All over the world, they want them, and we’re in a position to make them, and other countries aren’t,” Trump said.
Trump is due to review the White House’s 15-day social distancing guidelines on Monday. He has repeatedly insisted he wanted to get the country back to work as soon as possible.
But he said certain parts of the country — including New York — would not be ready for restrictions to be lifted next week.
However, he said he had no concerns about his own “discretionary” trip to travel to Norfolk, Virginia, on Saturday to bid bon voyage to the hospital ship USNS Comfort as it sails for Manhattan. He said it would be a “clean trip” by plane or helicopter.
“I think it sends a signal when the president is able to go there and say thank you,” he said.
The potential of the virus to upend national responses by infecting world leaders was illustrated when Johnson revealed he was sick earlier in the day.
“Be in no doubt that I can continue, thanks to the wizardry of modern technology, to communicate with all my top team, to lead the national fight back against coronavirus,” he said in a video message, adding that he was in isolation after developing a temperature and a persistent cough.
Elsewhere, Italy recorded its single biggest rise in deaths, with 969 more victims, and has the second-most cases after the United States.
And a tally maintained by Johns Hopkins University put the U.S. death toll at more than 1,500 and 100,000 cases nationwide.
