(CN) — President Donald Trump recently has taken to calling the United States the “king of ventilators,” ready to service Covid-19 patients domestically and internationally, but federal records show the royal line of succession runs through Europe.
U.S. investments in ventilators came late, with the federal government doling out billions in contracts long after New York had been forced into a dangerous compromise of splitting machines between two patients.
And “America First” nationalist rhetoric aside, the largest contractors tapped for this work have owners or corporate parents in the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
A Courthouse News investigation found that awards to the top-five ventilator contractors in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic topped $2.3 billion, more than $1.9 billion of which went to four companies with a foreign parent or owner.
All of those contracts had delivery dates scheduled well after the apex of Covid-19 infections in New York, the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic.
The data contradicts Trump’s bluster about U.S. dominance over the life-saving machines.
“Now, we’re the king of ventilators,” Trump boasted this past Saturday, when he first coined his regal analogy. “We have ventilators. We’re going to be helping other countries very soon. We’re going to be helping Mexico.”
A few days before that briefing, on April 15, the Department of Health and Human Services entered into roughly $551 million contract for ventilators with Swiss manufacturer Hamilton Medical.
New York coronavirus cases had already started to decline by that point, weeks after Empire State hospitals had been driven to pioneer a risky technique of splitting ventilators between two patients.
Hamilton Medical’s guidelines warn against this use of the machines.
“This will most probably result in distending (and damaging) the healthier lungs of the ventilated patients, while the lower compliant lungs will collapse further,” the company wrote, an assessment shared by six medical associations.
Another warning came on March 26: “Attempting to ventilate multiple patients with COVID‐19, given the issues described here, could lead to poor outcomes and high mortality rates for all patients cohorted,” the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation and five other groups wrote.
All five of the largest contracts America awarded for ventilators since the novel coronavirus broke out post-dated these warnings, a database of these contracts shows.
The largest coronavirus-related ventilator contract was a roughly $646.7 million award on April 8 to Philips North America, a subsidiary of the Dutch company Royal Philips that had boasted of its international ventilator sales to China, southern Europe and the United States.
“In line with Philips’ mission, we are fully committed to helping as many healthcare providers as possible diagnose, treat and monitor the growing numbers of Covid-19 patients,” Royal Philips CEO Frans van Houten said in a statement, announcing that more machines were being built in Pennsylvania and California.
That release highlighted an April 8 emergency-use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, aiming for production of 15,000 Philips Respironics E30 ventilators in Pennsylvania per week that month.
For two other models of hospital ventilator — Philips Trilogy and Philips Respironics V60 — the Dutch giant has partnered up with Jabil in St. Petersberg, Florida, and with Flex, which is legally domiciled in Singapore, but these machines are not expected to be made as quickly.
“The combined hospital ventilator output is projected to increase to 4,000 units per week by the third quarter of 2020,” Philips projected.
Hamilton Medical announced on April 14 that it had started ramping up production at its base in Switzerland earlier this year but would launch a new line for critical care ventilators in Reno, Nevada.
“The best approach is to create a new production line with a new supply chain — so that we could avoid diverting from existing production needed around the world or worsening the ongoing supply chain bottlenecks,” CEO Bob Hamilton said in the announcement, noting a partnership with General Motors.