2020-03-27

Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing on March 27, 2020

President: "This afternoon, I invoked the Defense Production Act to compel General Motors to accept, perform, and prioritize federal contracts for ventilators.  Ventilators are a big deal and we’ve delivered thousands of them.  And oftentimes, you don’t need ventilators very much.  Hospitals don’t have very many.  And now we’re — turning out that we have to produce large numbers.  But we’ve been able to do that and we’re going to be doing a lot more."

Peter Novarro, in charge of implementing the DPA, explained how it would work.

Peter. [a reporter]

Q    Mr. President, on the stockpile of supplies for a pandemic: Yesterday, from the podium, you blamed your predecessor, saying that when you arrived as President, you said, quote, “We took over an empty shelf.”  You’ve been President now for more than three years.  Why didn’t you and your administration fill that shelf?

THE PRESIDENT:  Yeah, I did.  We did fill it twice.  We filled it twice and we’ve been distributing that for — for literally a year.  We’ve been —

Q    So why are we in this position, I guess Americans are asking?

THE PRESIDENT:  — filling out — we’ve been — nice question, Peter.  Thank you very much.  We’v

e been filling it out and we’ve been filling that stockpile many, many times.  It’s been filled many, many times.

And now what we’re doing is something different because I think it’s better.  We’d fill it so it comes from wherever the point of manufacture or whatever is — we fill it and then we go — now it’s full — now we take it and we distribute it around.

Now, what we’re doing is, we have an emergency — we’re saying, “Go direct.  Go direct.  Go direct.”  We fill it only where necessary.  But now we’re trying to go direct.  So they drop it off in New York or they drop it off in Michigan, they drop it off in Virginia, wherever it may be — Florida.  Well, Florida is getting a lot — a lot of things.  And we’re finding it’s a much better system.  But we’ve filled and we’ve stockpiled many, many times.  Yeah, we ended up with an empty shelf.

VP Pence: "On the subject of supplies — and the President spoke about the priority that we’re placing on personal protective equipment, and especially ventilators, and I will not add to that — I can tell you that, this weekend, we’ll be reporting on aggressive efforts that our Supply [Chain] Stabilization Task Force at FEMA is taking to import medical supplies from around the world.  We’re working, as we speak, on an airlift from a number of countries around the globe to deliver very important medical protective equipment to the United States.

"At the present moment, you’ve heard the numbers, but from the Strategic National Stockpile, we distributed more than 7 million N95 respirators or masks, more than almost 3 million face shields, more than 8,000 ventilators.  And donations to the Strategic National supply: We mentioned Apple donating some 9 million masks that can be used by healthcare workers.  But Merck recently announced plans to donate 500,000 masks; USPS — 500,000 masks.  And a little company called Puritan, in Maine, is actually in the business now of manufacturing swabs.  So businesses large and small all across America are rising to the challenge."

Secretaries of Education and Agriculture, Betsy DeVos and Sonny Perdue spoke about their departments' response.