No. of Recommendations: 6
Dope1: And who was the guy that didn't refill the PPE stocks? Do you remember that? None other than Barack Obama.
After the republicans won the 2010 election the Obama administration released a budget request for $655 million for The Strategic National Stockpile, an increase of $59 million. But Congress ultimately allocated $534 million for the 2012 fiscal year, a 10% cut from the prior year.
Across-the-board cuts hit the CDC, which managed the stockpile at the time. Overall funding for the stockpile dropped to its lowest in 2013, to about $477 million.
The Associated Press reviewed federal purchasing contracts and found "federal agencies largely waited until mid-March of 2020 to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers." While HHS said early in the pandemic that the stockpile had 13 million masks, that was only a fraction of what hospitals needed, the AP found.
The cupboards were not bare as Cheetolini claimed and, in fact, he failed to even begin to replenish the stockpile of N95 masks until mid-March of 2020, several months after the pandemic was underway.
As for those Illinois RapidVent concept ventilators, kudos to my state's university but I can't find any evidence of them actually making it into hospitals before the middle of May, 2020 or later.
