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A report from Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee released Friday finds that the Trump administration overpaid by as much as $500 million for ventilators and was slow to respond to an offer to accelerate shipments in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak. The report finds that the Trump administration paid the manufacturer Philips $15,000 per ventilator, more than any other American purchaser. Some purchasers buying as few as just one ventilator negotiated prices down to as low as $9,327 per ventilator, the report said. The committee said the administration failed to negotiate the price down and...

Herman Cain, the former Republican presidential candidate and affable business magnate, died Thursday after being hospitalized for coronavirus, according to reports. Cain, 74, first went to an Atlanta hospital for treatment on July 1, his staff had said. His death was announced on Herman Cain's website and Facebook page. "Herman Cain – our boss, our friend, like a father to so many of us – has passed away," the statement on his website said, noting there were "hopeful indicators" in recent days that he'd recover but adding: "And yet we also felt real concern about the fact that he never...

ALBANY NY (WRGB) - New York State living up to its promise to help other states as they deal with large numbers of COVID-19 cases. The state is helping to supply a coronavirus testing site in Saint Petersburgh, Florida. The announcement was made by Governor Cuomo Wednesday. Joined by St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman, the governor announced the site at the Pinellas Community Church will provide Floridians with up to 500 tests per day. New York is sending thousands of test kits to make this happen, along with masks, PPE, hand sanitizer and ventilators. In addition to the items being...

Early reports out of Wuhan, China, and Italy cemented the impression that the vast majority of patients who required the breathing devices ultimately succumbed to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. But as the pandemic has continued, U.S. hospitals are reporting much lower mortality rates, results on par with death rates for patients with similar severe lung problems caused by other diseases. In a May 26 study in the journal Critical Care Medicine, Martin and a group of colleagues found that 35.7 percent of covid-19 patients who required ventilators died — a significant percentage but much lower than early...

Northwell Health probing whether ventilators caused coronavirus deaths New York’s largest hospital system is conducting a sweeping analysis of its use of ventilators while treating coronavirus patients during the peak of the pandemic — over concerns that an over-reliance on the machines may have cost lives. For so many sick COVID-19 patients, getting attached to a mechanical ventilator was a death sentence. More than two-thirds of the patients in Northwell Health facilities hooked to ventilators died in March and early April and the fatality rate was similar at other hospitals. At the beginning of the pandemic, health officials were worried...

  James S. Brady Press Briefing Room   2:17 P.M. EDT  MS. MCENANY:  Hello, everyone.  I want to highlight three critical aspects of President Trump’s response to the coronavirus that have exceeded the media’s expectations and should inspire confidence in every American across this country.  Rest assured the Trump administration is working tirelessly to defeat the invisible enemy.First, contrary to some media pronouncements, the United States did not need the 1 million ventilators thus far that the media said we were in dire need of.  In fact, it’s encouraging to be able to say that every single American who has...

WASHINGTON - As requests for ventilators from the national stockpile reached a crescendo in late March, President Donald Trump made what seemed like a bold claim: His administration would have 100,000 within 100 days. At the time, the Department of Health and Human Services had not ordered any new ventilators since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in January. But records show that over the following three weeks, the agency scrambled to turn Trump’s pledge into a reality, spending nearly $3 billion to spur U.S. manufacturers to crank out the breathing machines at an unprecedented pace. An analysis of federal...

Back when Gov. Cuomo was expecting to need something like 30,000 ventilators, New York got a tip from FEMA about an Silicon Valley engineer who claimed he could procure thousands of ventilators from China. The person in question, Yaron Oren-Pines, had no history of procuring medical equipment from anywhere but the state was desperate so it agreed to this terms and signed an $86 million contract: Interested buyers had to sign a contract within four hours of receiving a quote and pay the entirety of the order upfront. “Nonnegotiable,” the catalog said. And the engineer, Yaron Oren-Pines, had no...

The ventilators received from China, the Shangrila 510 model, were built by one of the country's major ventilator manufacturers, Beijing Aeonmed Co. Ltd. The manufacturer could not be reached for comment. The letter detailed serious concerns over the "basic" quality of the ventilators, calling the oxygen supply "variable and unreliable." The doctors said that the machines are also unfamiliar to British doctors and were built for ambulance use, rather than hospital use. Addressed directly to a senior NHS official, the letter stated: "We look forward to the withdrawal and replacement of these ventilators with devices better able to provide intensive...

In addition to a bevy of state orders, Gov. Andrew Cuomo made desperate overtures to the federal government to step in. In response, and in record time, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scrambled to erect at least four field hospitals, and the Navy deployed its USNS Comfort hospital ship to Manhattan. However, those efforts – and the many millions of dollars spent on them – have largely been deemed a waste, even as New York has battled a soaring a death toll and is maintaining stay-at-home orders. So what happened? "[The models] have been extremely inaccurate," Dr. David Samadi,...

Science is not a set of facts. Science is a method by which we try to work out facts. But when science course-corrects in the public eye, instead of being lauded as improving our models, the public and media seize on it by saying, "Doctors don't know what they're doing. Doctors are killing people." COVID-19 is a new disease, one we've never seen before. When it first hit our shores, we thought it would behave in the same way that other pneumonias that cause an acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, do. These patients have stiff lungs and require high...

LONDON - Senior British doctors have warned that 250 ventilators the United Kingdom bought from China risk causing "significant patient harm, including death," if they are used in hospitals, according to a letter seen by NBC News. The doctors said the machines had a problematic oxygen supply, could not be cleaned properly, had an unfamiliar design and a confusing instruction manual, and were built for use in ambulances, not hospitals. The British case is not an isolated one, and it comes as a stark example of a procurement problem that has plagued many countries as the coronavirus has spread throughout...

The state of New York paid $69 million for ventilators to a man with no background in medical supplies after he tweeted at President Donald Trump and the White House coronavirus task force recommended him as a vendor, BuzzFeed News reported. The ventilators never arrived. On March 27, as the novel coronavirus was surging through the US, Trump urged Ford and General Motors on Twitter to "START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!" Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley, replied to the tweet, writing, "We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT." BuzzFeed reported that New...

New York State paid a Silicon Valley electrical engineer more than $69 million for a ventilators that never arrived, according to a report on Wednesday. Yaron Oren-Pines on March 30 pocketed $69.1 million for 1,450 ventilators — a jaw-dropping $47,656 per ventilator — at least triple the standard retail price of high-end models, Buzzfeed News reported. The Empire State terminated the contract about a month later and is now trying to claw back the cash, the report said.

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, we are woefully short of ventilators that can give the most gravely ill a chance for life. There are many efforts afoot to build more ventilators. Now, instead of building ventilators, a group of open-source developers has a new idea: Create a firmware update, Airbreak, which can transform common Constant Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machines into non-invasive ventilators.  Their first effort -- a proof of concept -- converts the Airsense 10 CPAP machine, which is a common, inexpensive sleep apnea treatment device, into a ventilator. It does so by simply replacing its existing firmware with updated firmware. With this...

The new Dynamic Ventilator Reserve provides a promising model for delivering necessary healthcare supplies to areas in need. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Government has worked tirelessly to “bend the curve” and prevent healthcare utilization from exceeding the healthcare system’s capacity. Given ventilators’ life-saving role, it is important that demand stay below supply so that no person who is in need of a ventilator is denied one.Federal policy has achieved this objective so far, and the Trump Administration recently announced the voluntary Dynamic Ventilator Reserve to ensure that patients everywhere can continue accessing ventilators. The Dynamic Ventilator Reserve will...

At a coronavirus-task-force briefing at the beginning of April, White House adviser Jared Kushner explained the approach that would — as events proved — get the country through its ventilator crisis. The media relentlessly pilloried and mocked him, distorting his words in the process. Kushner said at one point that states shouldn’t be drawing on the federal stockpile just to hold ventilators in their own reserves (the administration was worried about ventilators sent to New York state not making it to hard-pressed hospitals in the Big Apple).

It may seem odd that hospitals are empty as planned medical procedures are canceled, but to subject your body to the stress of surgery and recovery would put you in danger needlessly. The recent article “I Can’t Get My Hip Surgery Because Of Coronavirus Even Though Nobody Is In Our Hospital” highlighted the very real problems coronavirus has created in all our communities. It is true that necessary preparations have compounded challenges and left many suffering in ways that are not immediately obvious. As a physician dealing with COVID-19, I have a different perspective.My heart goes out to you, Anonymous....

What a difference two weeks makes. Way back in in those bad old days two weeks ago when President Donald J. Trump (R) was the Prince of Evil because Wuhan, China Coronovirus-19 existed due to something he did or did not do, Democratic party presidential savior and female wet dream, New York State Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo demanded 40,000 ventilators, because scientists told him they were necessary to save lives. But evil Trump scoffed, declaring that many weren't necessary. Cuomo defended the state’s request for 30,000 more ventilators to save coronavirus patients, a day after President Trump downplayed the need....

Ann Coulter Retweeted WAIT! New York (New York!) is now trying to get rid of its ventilator stockpile. Not that Michigan needs them either. Truckloads of them are going to travel the country like a night circus... https://t.co/8DNfH6C4vx— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 15, 2020 In our hour of need, other states stepped up to help us. We promised we would do the same. We will be sending 100 ventilators to Michigan and 50 ventilators to Maryland.— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) April 15, 2020