US Election 2020

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A reporter asked about Sen. King, and the Orange hick responded "he's a Democrat, ......it was staged".

www.pressherald.com

On call with Pence, Sen. King calls administration’s failure to expand testing a ‘dereliction of duty’

The Maine senator, an independent, participated in a call with Democratic senators in which he reportedly told the vice president that he had "never been so mad about a phone call in my life."
www.pressherald.com www.pressherald.com

The Maine senator, an independent, participated in a call with Democratic senators in which he reportedly told the vice president that he had "never been so mad about a phone call in my life."

Sen. Angus King vented his frustrations about the Trump administration’s coronavirus response directly to Vice President Mike Pence during a tense conference call Friday, calling the administration’s failure to rapidly expand testing a “dereliction of duty.”

“I have never been so mad about a phone call in my life,” King said during the call, multiple members of the Washington press corps reported on Twitter.

King’s “dereliction of duty” comment was described to The Washington Post by a person who joined the hourlong call but was unauthorized to discuss it and granted anonymity. Contacted Friday night, King spokesman Matthew Felling would neither confirm nor deny to the Press Herald whether the senator used those words because Felling did not listen to the call.

Later Friday, King publicly expressed his anger with the administration, which he says is offloading its responsibilities to states.

“If you know me, you know I’m a pretty even-tempered guy – but right now I’m angry,” King tweeted Friday evening. “We need widespread testing to understand the scope of this problem and the administration has the tools to lead the charge.”

So far, President Trump has shifted much of the responsibility for responding to the deadly pandemic to state governors.
 
No masks for him.

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www.independent.co.uk

White House scrambled to provide masks for senior staff, while advising the public to not wear them, report says

The CDC now recommends for the public to wear a face covering when out in public
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk

"While the administration had detailed pandemic response plans, somehow those did not include maintaining a supply of masks for White House personnel," an administration official told the newspaper anonymously. "That was a lesson learned. We did look at buying some, but couldn't find available supply."

Taiwan sent 500,000 masks to the US at a time when the country had banned commercial exports of the face shield so it could be used by its own residents.

A majority of the masks sent by the government were placed in the Strategic National Stockpile to then get distributed among states in need. But 3,600 of those masks went to the White House


www.thedailybeast.com

WH Rushed to Get Masks for Staff as US Discouraged Use: WaPo

A White House team made an appeal to Taiwan for face masks while Trump and the CDC were discouraging the American public from wearing them.
www.thedailybeast.com www.thedailybeast.com

us.cnn.com

10 coronavirus-unit nurses are suspended, potentially for weeks, for refusing to work without N95 masks

Nurses say they are still on administrative leave from Santa Monica, California's Providence Saint John's Health Center for demanding they be given N95 masks while treating Covid-19 patients.
us.cnn.com us.cnn.com
 
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From the New England Journal of Medicine

As a chief physician executive, I rarely get involved in my health system’s supply-chain activities. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed that. Protecting our caregivers is essential so that these talented professionals can safely provide compassionate care to our patients. Yet we continue to be stymied by a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and the cavalry does not appear to be coming.

Our supply-chain group has worked around the clock to secure gowns, gloves, face masks, goggles, face shields, and N95 respirators. These employees have adapted to a new normal, exploring every lead, no matter how unusual. Deals, some bizarre and convoluted, and many involving large sums of money, have dissolved at the last minute when we were outbid or outmuscled, sometimes by the federal government. Then we got lucky, but getting the supplies was not easy.

A lead came from an acquaintance of a friend of a team member. After several hours of vetting, we grew confident of the broker’s professional pedigree and the potential to secure a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators. The latter were KN95 respirators, N95s that were made in China. We received samples to confirm that they could be successfully fit-tested. Despite having cleared this hurdle, we remained concerned that the samples might not be representative of the bulk of the products that we would be buying. Having acquired the requisite funds — more than five times the amount we would normally pay for a similar shipment, but still less than what was being requested by other brokers — we set the plan in motion. Three members of the supply-chain team and a fit tester were flown to a small airport near an industrial warehouse in the mid-Atlantic region. I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected.

Hours before our planned departure, we were told to expect only a quarter of our original order. We went anyway, since we desperately needed any supplies we could get. Upon arrival, we were jubilant to see pallets of KN95 respirators and face masks being unloaded. We opened several boxes, examined their contents, and hoped that this random sample would be representative of the entire shipment. Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure. I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse.

This experience might have made for an entertaining tale at a cocktail party, had the success of our mission not been so critical. Did I foresee, as a health-system leader working in a rich, highly developed country with state-of-the-art science and technology and incredible talent, that my organization would ever be faced with such a set of circumstances? Of course not. Yet when encountering the severe constraints that attend this pandemic, we must leave no stone unturned to give our health care teams and our patients a fighting chance. This is the unfortunate reality we face in the time of Covid-19.

Andrew W. Artenstein, M.D.
Baystate Health, Springfield, MA
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