What Trump can do right now to address the ventilator shortage.

While health care professionals globally struggle to contain the COVID -19 pandemic, acute care patients are taxing ICU units worldwide. Critical to the care needed for the most serious cases is breathing support through mechanical ventilators. In Italy, the worst hit nation in Europe, the lack of ventilators has forced physicians to deny life saving breathing support to patients who could otherwise survive, in a macabre, battlefield-like triage system. Could ventilators be mass produced at lightning speed to prevent this in America? Possibly, but to do it will require more that consultation with large manufacturing CEOs like Elon Musk and GM’s Mary Barra. Here are the key points:
1. The priority should be to maximize the production of current ventilator manufacturers. 24/7 assembly should be implemented as soon as possible, with the same for the supply chain that feeds those companies. To keep final assembly lines fed, the military should be used to shuttle components and subassemblies as needed to keep lines running. This should include helicopters and cargo aircraft as needed on a 1A priority involving state and local police and air traffic control. Attempts to add production from automakers and other non-medical device manufacturers will interfere with current production and must be avoided.
2. Standard approval processes for component parts and assemblies must be waived. Non-FDA approved plastics, for example, may have to be substituted for medical grade materials and non-medical injection molding and extrusion shops will likely be pressed into service. Post- production sterilization will have to take the place of specialty thermoplastics and elastomers, many of which are compounded with anti-microbial additives.
3. Supply chains are global today and standard inspections and import controls must be waived for critical components. Jet cargo aircraft should be used to get parts into the country, and they should be cleared to fly to the closest airports to the factories and not cross docked onto other modes of transportation unless absolutely necessary.

Skilled assembly labor will be necessary to rapidly ramp production. To achieve this, assemblers from other medical device manufacturing firms not building ventilators should be assigned to the task, paid by their parent companies and housed in local hotels as needed to staff 24/7 operations. The worker’s parent corporations then back bill FEMA for the costs, but use existing accounting and payroll systems.
To make a program like this work, Key manufacturing engineering and production personnel need to be moving between supplier facilities in real time. Again, the military can move people quickly, anywhere and with the drastic reduction in travel, housing assembly workers temporarily in hotels during the crisis is relatively simple. Trump has the power to make this all happen, immediately. This is the “hottest job in the shop”, but days and even hours count now.