With a trademark shrug, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s fixer, has flicked off a wave of criticism for his involvement in the coronavirus war to help speed up the opening of drugstore virus drive-in tests and the collection of millions of N95 masks and ventilators, according to senior administration officials.
Rapped in the media for causing disruption in the multiagency effort, several senior officials involved with the fight on Tuesday gave Kushner credit for clearing a path for government and private industry to team up and solve critical issues.
One key area is the drive-up virus testing long promised but unfulfilled. This week, officials said that Kushner’s push for drive-ups succeeded when CVS opened three and several other drugstore giants followed suit.
In Rhode Island, the CVS in Woonsocket is offering free tests with the Abbott Labs quick nasal swab test that offers nearly instant results.
In a testimonial of how it went, one user told Rhode Island Magazine, “I’m relieved by my negative result but, perhaps more than that, I’m also grateful for this new testing capability. I’m also comforted by the steady bravery of the health care professionals, National Guard members and other essential workers who put their lives on the line every day.”
A Kushner team member said that the CVS operations came quickly after prototypes were tested. “We’re scaling it up now that they know how to do it,” said the official.
A third official said that from the time in mid-March that Trump asked Kushner to play a key role in helping expand testing, testing numbers surged tenfold.
Kushner, who like Trump has a business background, has worked his industry connections to find needed personal protective equipment such as N95 masks and ventilators and aided in landing about 100,000 more machines and an additional 150 million 3M respirators.
Officials stressed that Kushner is not running his own show as portrayed by critics but is a hands-on coordinator and communicator between Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s task force and a small army of officials dispatched throughout the government, especially the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, to speed the response to the virus.
“This effort emphasized the hands-on approach that Jared Kushner has played over the past few weeks,” said a senior official involved in opening the drive-ins and the worldwide “AirBridge program” to jet in personal protective equipment from overseas.
Another official said that “the job” Trump gave Kushner was to coordinate the private and public sector to move faster and together, something the president’s son-in-law has done on other issues.
“The direction that came from the president of the United States was really to say, hey, the job we have here, given that it is so unprecedented and given that we’ve never been in a situation like this, is to combine the best of public and private sectors in order to come up with innovative strategies to identify and address something that we’ve never seen,” said the official of Kushner’s public-private team.
The official said that the team, which works closely with the White House Coronavirus Task Force, is to find problem areas and clear away the hurdles with the coordination of Pence’s group.
“Jared’s role is bringing this public-private approach because there are problems we’ve never seen in government. We’ve never seen a disease like this, so you can’t approach it the way you always would,” said the official, speaking on background.
