U.S. paid a Texas company nearly $70 million for ventilators that were unfit for covid-19 patients
This spring, amid a panic over a shortage of ventilators to treat the anticipated surge in coronavirus cases, the Pentagon announced the purchase of $84 million worth of breathing machines from four companies. One of the ventilators, the SAVe II+, made by a small Plano, Tex.-based company called AutoMedx, stood out from the rest.
To start, the deal was for an upgraded version of the SAVe II that hadn’t even been designed yet, according to the company’s chairman. In addition, the existing $6,000 SAVe II machine, developed with military backing as a lightweight ventilator to keep wounded soldiers alive while being transported from the battlefield, had specifications far below the other three ventilators the Pentagon purchased. In a research study conducted for the Pentagon years earlier, the SAVe II had been declared unfit for use in a respiratory pandemic.
Defense Department medical workers who had been told to use the existing SAVe II device on covid-19 patients quickly came to the conclusion that it was ill-suited for the coronavirus pandemic, and began to voice their consternation to each other in emails that were shared with The Washington Post. One of the workers, who had been instructed to use the device if there were a surge of coronavirus patients, described it as “awful and under-powered.” Another raised concerns that using an ill-suited ventilator would “kill [covid-19 patients] just as fast as no ventilator at all.”
It’s unclear why AutoMedx, which had emerged from bankruptcy about six months earlier, received the no-bid emergency contract worth nearly $70 million for ventilators that, by every measure, were not suitable for covid-19 patients. AutoMedx eventually provided 11,200 ventilators at an average cost per ventilator of $6,274. Those ventilators are now in the country’s strategic reserve.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/07/us-ventilator-wont-work-covid-patients/