Ex-Trump official blames Congress for lack of PPE — but Trump could have allocated funds for it immediately
According to doctors interviewed by CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the United States could have scaled up personal protective equipment for doctors, hospitals and for all Americans, but the money wasn't there from Congress until April.
"The nation's federal pandemic infrastructure was not prepared for the crisis that was quickly unfolding," Gupta explained. "Our public health system was not prepared. Our emergency stockpile supplies were not prepared. The supply chain itself -- all of it unprepared."
Dr. Robert Kadlec said, "when we started the pandemic in January, we didn't know what the status of the supply chain was. We didn't know what hospitals had on hand. We didn't know what the state's supplies were. We didn't know what the commercial distributors got on their shelves and we didn't know what was in the manufacturer's warehouse."
The Department of Health and Human Services had plans to enforce the Defense Production Act, which would have allowed the federal government to quickly produce PPE.
"It was not signed or enacted for some time later," said Gupta.
Dr. Kadlec blamed that on Congress, despite the fact that the president is the one who signs the Defense Production Act to quickly allocate government funds.
"Well, you have to have a contract," he claimed. "That did not happen until April because we did not get our money until March. We can only be prepared for the amount of money we have."
Trump rarely used the Defense Production Act to deal with the pandemic, said an expose from the New York Times in Sept. 2020.
Trump didn't implement the act until April 2, and it was only for ventilators not for PPE.
Watch the interviews below:
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