04-21-2020, 02:18 AM
I do. We were doomed! It was only a few weeks ago
From the "never-Trump" NationalReview.
How the Media Completely Blew the Trump Ventilator Story
From the "never-Trump" NationalReview.
How the Media Completely Blew the Trump Ventilator Story
By RICH LOWRY April 19, 2020 10:53
The administration handled the potential shortage deftly.
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.
He was relentlessly pilloried, mocked, and distorted in the press for it.
After nearly four years of unrelieved Trump hysteria in the media, it’s hard to rank the worst journalistic outrages, but how Kushner’s remarks were misreported and misinterpreted belongs high on the list.
Much of the press coverage and subsequent commentary focused on one sentence at that April 2 briefing: “The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”
Cue the outrage. As CNBC put it, correctly, in a headline, “Jared Kushner slammed for saying the federal medical supply stockpile isn’t meant for states.”
The blue-checkmarks on Twitter descended in force. Representative Ted Lieu tweeted, “Dear Jared Kushner of the @realDonaldTrump: We are the UNITED STATES of America. The federal stockpile is reserved for all Americans living in our states not just federal employees. Get it?”
Former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub thundered, “Who the hell does the nepotist think ‘our’ refers to? It is for the American people.”
Partisan outlets piled on. “Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser,” Salon wrote, “claimed that the federal stockpile of medical supplies is not for individual states to ‘use,’ even though that is exactly the reason why the stockpile exists.”
And so did mainstream outlets. ABC News rapped Kushner for his “inaccurate description” of the stockpile, which “actually is intended for states’ use.”
In a piece for The New Yorker, Susan Glasser went even further. She wrote that the press briefing “will surely go down as one of the Administration’s most callous performances.” It was symptomatic, she argued, of a federal response that was a “failure by design — not a problem to be fixed but a policy choice by President Trump that either would not or could not be undone.”
All of this was completely ridiculous and wrong. With even a little context, it was obvious what Kushner was saying: States shouldn’t be drawing on the federal stockpile just to hold ventilators in their own reserves while hard-pressed cities were running low.
This was obvious from the very next sentence from Kushner: “So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local — local situations and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them.”
The proximate reason for Kushner’s comment about the state stockpiles was a dispute between the Trump administration and New York governor Andrew Cuomo. New York City was running out of ventilators. The administration had sent 4,400 but learned that 2,000 of them were being held by the state and hadn’t made their way to the city.
The controversial sentence was part of a long answer setting out the administration’s strategy on ventilators that has, despite all the hue and cry, clearly worked. The emphasis — with Jared Kushner and his team in the middle of it, and capable leadership from Rear Admiral John Polowczyk at FEMA and Admiral Brett Giroir at HHS — was on data and shrewd allocation, so that ventilators did not go to states simply on request.
There’s no doubt that the lockdowns, in bending the curve of cases downward, have played a role in averting any shortage — one of the points of the lockdowns in the first place, of course. But there was no guarantee that we would get to this place where we are today, with ventilators no longer a significant worry.
At the outset, the country was looking at a daunting, perhaps impossible challenge. A chilling briefing at FEMA early on posited that the U.S. could be short 130,000 ventilators by April 1. The federal government had about 16,000 ventilators on hand in its stockpile and several thousand more from the Veteran’s Administration and the Department of Defense.
It was possible the government could perform at the highest level — and still fall short. A couple of insights drove the administration’s effort to get its arms around the problem.
Officials realized, as one White House adviser puts it, that there was “too much guesstimating” going on. New York, for instance, said it needed 40,000 ventilators. Then, the administration interrogated the request. What was that based on? It’s coming from public-health officials. Okay, how are they getting that number? Models. Plus, we don’t want to be short.
The administration handled the potential shortage deftly.
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.
He was relentlessly pilloried, mocked, and distorted in the press for it.
After nearly four years of unrelieved Trump hysteria in the media, it’s hard to rank the worst journalistic outrages, but how Kushner’s remarks were misreported and misinterpreted belongs high on the list.
Cue the outrage. As CNBC put it, correctly, in a headline, “Jared Kushner slammed for saying the federal medical supply stockpile isn’t meant for states.”
The blue-checkmarks on Twitter descended in force. Representative Ted Lieu tweeted, “Dear Jared Kushner of the @realDonaldTrump: We are the UNITED STATES of America. The federal stockpile is reserved for all Americans living in our states not just federal employees. Get it?”
Former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub thundered, “Who the hell does the nepotist think ‘our’ refers to? It is for the American people.”
Partisan outlets piled on. “Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser,” Salon wrote, “claimed that the federal stockpile of medical supplies is not for individual states to ‘use,’ even though that is exactly the reason why the stockpile exists.”
In a piece for The New Yorker, Susan Glasser went even further. She wrote that the press briefing “will surely go down as one of the Administration’s most callous performances.” It was symptomatic, she argued, of a federal response that was a “failure by design — not a problem to be fixed but a policy choice by President Trump that either would not or could not be undone.”
This was obvious from the very next sentence from Kushner: “So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local — local situations and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them.”
The controversial sentence was part of a long answer setting out the administration’s strategy on ventilators that has, despite all the hue and cry, clearly worked. The emphasis — with Jared Kushner and his team in the middle of it, and capable leadership from Rear Admiral John Polowczyk at FEMA and Admiral Brett Giroir at HHS — was on data and shrewd allocation, so that ventilators did not go to states simply on request.
There’s no doubt that the lockdowns, in bending the curve of cases downward, have played a role in averting any shortage — one of the points of the lockdowns in the first place, of course. But there was no guarantee that we would get to this place where we are today, with ventilators no longer a significant worry.
It was possible the government could perform at the highest level — and still fall short. A couple of insights drove the administration’s effort to get its arms around the problem.
Officials realized, as one White House adviser puts it, that there was “too much guesstimating” going on. New York, for instance, said it needed 40,000 ventilators. Then, the administration interrogated the request. What was that based on? It’s coming from public-health officials. Okay, how are they getting that number? Models. Plus, we don’t want to be short.
