The Defense Production Act gives the federal government pretty far reaching powers to control and seize goods needed to fight covid-19. If they claim you're hoarding, they can seize it, AFAIK without a warrant.
Or the need for a working supply chain. It's a dysfunction on a couple of levels here, not just in the power of the government - if it was able and willing to provide supply this wouldn't be an issue at all. Instead hospitals are scrounging on their own.
It's not really about "power" as a one-axis variable; I don't see even the most anti-government people in the US campaigning to reduce the government's nuclear weapons stockpile, and you don't get much more power than that.
They can demand but Trump won't answer subpoenas. Whatcha gonna do, the constitutional answer to a rogue president bucking congressional oversight is impeachment but the Senate already made it clear there's no possible act that could get them to convict.
Lawmakers don't have any actual power if the agencies resist them. One great example of this was during the initial travel bans, both lawmakers and judges were unable to get CBP/DHS to actually comply with orders because the government employees working for those agencies simply ignored them. When that happens the only real option a judge has is to send federal marshals out to enforce an order (as far as I know), and there's no guarantee the marshals will listen.
This is not true at all. Congress controls the purse. CBP can ignore all they want, but they would probably be more pliable if they were not getting paid.
Also "...all civil officers of the United States" can be removed directly by the Senate. In practice this is limited to heads of agencies at the lowest but that is just a practice, anyone executing federal power is applicable.
> President Donald Trump likes to tell a story about the U.S. paying out billions of dollars to Iran as part of the multinational deal freezing its nuclear program and easing sanctions against it. What he doesn’t say is that most of that money was Iran’s to begin with. The rest relates to an old debt the U.S. had with Iran.
The reason being that US propped up a brutal totalitarian pro-US dictator in Iran that was overthrown, and ended up with a mutually dysfunctional relationship with the people who overthrew him. It then gave weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein, in his invasion of Iran, which did little to help that relationship.
Yep. Started out of nowhere a few weeks/months ago by someone who has no experience in medical supplies whatsoever, who says "We found new supply chains".
And is heavily involved with Republican heavyweights.
If anyone can explain how a new entrant into supply/distribution of medical equipment was started and got large supplies of critical and scarce equipment that is being actively confiscated by government agencies in orders from other countries/private US companies... I am all ears.
Technically it's more like choosing which doctors and nurses die based on political connections and electoral math, since somebody is still getting the stuff.
Which is still disgusting, but let's not pretend this is operating under a fundamentally different incentive system than the one in which Congress allocates tax dollars. If you want to fix it then fix the whole of it.
Not necessarily. The US government has supposedly been seizing masks off stockpilers who've been trying to price gouge, paying them the normal, non-inflated price, and then feeding them to hospitals through the normal supply chain (because they're not interested in setting up their own parallel distribution infrastructure).
" the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks."
Ok... the FBI said everything is on the up-and-up and the trucks are heading out.
"But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE."
Oh no! Our hero has suddenly divined that the entire Department of Homeland Security is planning to swoop in and intercept the trucks (that the FBI just sent on their way.)
What is our hero going to do? Who can save the masks from the nefarious DHS who, I'm sure, were even then sending agents out in black helicopters to finish the seizure that's the hapless FBI agents bungled?
"Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure."
Thank god! Where would we be without our auick-thinking administrator? A single phone call and he has saved the day!
But, it wasn't without personal cost...
"I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse."
His angst and concern is moving. He deserves a raise. Where would we be without our hero?
You want to know what really happened? Some cubicle-dwelling administrator drives to a banger, gets scared shitless by FBI agents, and embellishes the story to impress the other cubicle-dwelling adminstrators.
Mass. Governor Charlie Baker coordinated with BJ's Wholesale to get a shipment of 2M N95 masks...they were all "sized" (stolen) by the Feds. The governor then coordinated with Patriots owner Robert Kraft to use the patriots private jet to go get 1M masks. Thank goodness to the Kraft family and their support in this situation. There has been 0 transparency or audit trail with where these masks are going that the Feds are seizing. If I were Charlie Baker I would call up the National Guard and tell them to retrieve the masks that were sized by any means necessary. This is an absolute disgrace, and blatant theft by the Feds.
The same happened all over europe. European countries seizing equipment in transit toward other european countries. Even France did it (despite Macron's insistance on European cooperation).
Just to point out a distinction, this more similar to the EU as an entity seizing shipments headed to Germany or France rather than another country within Europe taking them.
More details here [1]. 4 million masks from Sweden (although newspapers had initially reported they were for Sweden) were seized while stored in France. This includes 1 million that were shipped towards France, 1 million towards Switzerland, 2 millions towards Italy and Spain.
After much diplomacy, 2 millions were released. My guess is that these are the masks meant for Italy and Spain (part of the EU) and that the masks shipped outside of the EU (Switzerland) were requisitioned.
That's certainly not ideal, but still completely different. Many countries have understandably banned/slowed exporting these supplies. Some of those restrictions certainly went too far: Canada, for example, depends on US suppliers for some materials, and cutting them off completely is going to hurt them rather badly while, due to size differences, not being all that significant for the US. The same is true for some European countries. Sometimes country A depends on B for X, and B depends on A for Y. The first or second most important region for ventilator manufacturing, for example, happens to be... northern Italy!
What the Federal Government in the US is doing is something different altogether. They're confiscating material within individual states. It's not even clear why they have jurisdiction. They seem to sometimes argue from a default assumption of shipments being destined for the black market, and otherwise simply rely on raw power, FBI badges, and ill-defined emergency powers.
They are being reallocated (with strong indications being that it's for political gain by the current administration and to help vulnerable congressional candidates) or given to private entities.
This is yet another example of something that would be the greatest or one of the greatest presidential scandals in US history, but is hardly noticeable given the background level of scandal and distraction.
Respond to me, don't downvote me. Also, explain how Blue Flame Medical started and got its inventory, and how inventory from Operation Airbridge were procured/where they went.
I was little curious why Newsom wasn't wanting to release details of California's billion dollar contract for N95 masks. His office even said disclosing details could threaten the supply. It makes a lot more sense if they're afraid the government will seize them.
I wish the guidelines contained a statement like, "Downvotes are for posts that don't follow these guidelines, not posts you just disagree with." Downvoting for disagreement seems equivalent to replying "Shut up."
I have never found it productive to respond to a post saying "I downvoted this because I think you're needlessly injecting toxic partisanship into your response". (I'm not entirely sure it's productive even as a meta-comment here, but I feel obligated to explain it's not just a "shut up" button.)
Let me say I made a mistake mentioning it, and I don't care about points. I really only wanted to challenge people to reply in the case they disagreed. I respect their choice not to reply, also.
They mean that it’s more likely to cost the world utility (in terms of starting a flame war, often between third parties who are neither the OP nor the downvoter) than produce any utility (by satisfying the curiosity of the downvoted person.)
Not everyone has time to articulate their disagreement and since that is often more work than was put into the original statement, not really fair to expect.
I would interpret it as a more general "nah". The author could then reflect and likely see reasons why someone would disagree.
I find 90% of downvotes are douchebags who disagree on HN. Maybe 99% on sites like reddit. It leads to an echo chamber effect. People with different points of view feel unwelcome.
I create throw-away accounts (one per device, until I clear cookies, and then a new one). I have one where literally everything I post gets a pile of downvotes. I'm assuming someone's stalking that one and using an army of bots to downvote everything I post, presumably because I offended them at some point.
I think the fix is for a downvote to require a rationale -- you need to state why you're downvoting. Poster learns what not to do. Downvoter needs to do it for a quasi-rational reason.
I mean you have to have 500 karma to down vote and they can detect bots especially if you contact admin and report it. If you require explaination it enables trolls to do the equivallent of logic bombing the discussion, requireing an asymettric amount of resources to respond and spamming the thread with meta convos.
I don't know that's why that account always gets downvoted; that's just a hypothesis. I don't know who downvotes. And I've never bothered reporting to admin.
The internet has a small set of hyperactive people. It has a larger number of people (like me) who don't bother with karma. And a huge number of people who check out and don't participate in discussions. I don't think there's much alignment between the groups, and who you want posting.
The mods / downvoters / etc. are in the hyper-active group, and on most sites, overactive mods tend to lead to echo chambers, and to a lot of people checking out. I haven't left HN because of this (I think the karma minimum for downvoting helps a lot), but I've left many web sites when they became too dumb or too one-sided.
HN hasn't yet gone stupid, but there is a strong correlation between downvotes and political alignment. I'm not so much talking about just left/right, but also libertarian, tech elitist, etc. I think 90% of whether my posts end up +10 or -2 depends on how well they align.
I honestly wish sites like HN would get rid of downvotes. It's generally only useful for generating an echo chamber. If a comment is particularly disruptive, it should just be reported. Otherwise lack of upvotes will naturally send it to the bottom of the page and comments giving reasonable responses if the comment is wrong about something are more than sufficient.
If I’m editing code and I see some code that doesn’t belong, then I delete it. Sometimes a downvote is similar. To comment further is to perpetuate a conversation which is, perhaps, better deleted.
Please don’t take offense, but that includes this post of yours. I don’t need to read this down-vote debate for the 1000th time. This entire comment chain is basically off-topic and breaks the flow of an interesting discussion.
> pg: I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
Clarifying question...the "strong indications" are that the best explanation of how Blue Flame Medical acquired the inventory it boasts of is that it must be conspiring with the feds?
They seem to have little prior experience, ramped up quickly in a competitive sector, and have had extraordinary success. Perhaps they are much better than their competitors, perhaps it's just luck, or perhaps they are less successful than they are presenting. There are other explanations, but you still have to account for the federal seizures of private orders and where they are going.
It's very likely that they're less successful than they're claiming. There have been a lot of really shady businesses set up claiming to be able to provide large quantities of PPE and ripping off desperate hospital systems. If they're new to the business, most likely they're either one of those companies or are being ripped off by another supplier doing the same scam. Has anyone confirmed actual, successful purchases from them?
Prior little experience in what exactly? This is the sort of situation where those with deep rolodexes and lots of connections are able to find opportunity.
> I must admit it’s never a good look when a week-old company receives a sizeable federal contract. Especially when the founders are political insiders.
I don’t see why. A politically well-connected person (previously well-known in their circles for other successful ventures) wants to help get something done; the obvious thing for them to do is to create a new company (for legal reasons, to separate it from their other ventures) and then get people to put money / contracts into it.
To be expected. They don't come with a tin foil lining. The CIA perfected their mind control tech that was being trialed on Obama's diplomatic missions.
Yes, these were paid in advance by MA. There have been dozens of similar reports. Nobody is currently shipping anything without up-front payment.
Here's a detailed account from a hospital administrator in the New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2010025 (Edit: did the linked article change? Anyway: the up-front payment is described in the article, that I somehow managed to link here again).
This one ends well. Others didn't.
Note that this isn't about the money. It's literally life-saving equipment.
The Federal Government has to either take responsibility, take over all purchasing, and distribute the material in a transparent, need-based process.
OR it can tell the states to each do their own thing. They'll outbid each other and end up paying far more than necessary, many will buy more than needed to be on the safe side because the political risk is highly asymmetrical. It's a stupid way to do this, and it will cost lives (and money). But, unlike testing, it's not totally impossible.
What the Federal Administration can't do is tell the states do buy their own supplies, then intercept any shipments and... well, nobody really seems to know what they're doing with it.
The best-case scenario for what's happening is probably just incompetence. If, in six months or so, a gigantic stash of PPE is found in some warehouse, people in the administration will point to that as vindication: see! we didn't intentionally kill anybody.
Second best scenario: Are they giving it back to commercial resellers that happen to be golf buddies with the son-in-law, who then get to sell the same shipment several times? Somehow, commercial distributors seem to be involved. We'll hopefully find out about the why and how in due course.
Nightmare scenario: if the narrative about conservative and swing states receiving far more, both in terms of population as well as disease burden, than blue states turns out to be true... I don't know what happens? That's so far beyond the pale it would never even be considered possible in normal times.
I mean...I don't have a link to back this up, and would be happy to be corrected, but my understanding was that your "Nightmare Scenario" is already known to be verifiably true, and possibly even explicitly stated as intentional by Trump himself. (Though I'll certainly grant that "stated by Trump" and "verifiably true" do not have a particularly high positive correlation.)
Even assuming it's true, it might actually be preferable to allow them to come up with some face-saving "clerical error" and reverse course. That's assuming they are at least somewhat spooked by these stories coming out now and have belatedly realised the trouble they are in otherwise. Yes, I know that isn't likely to happen.
That's not because I have any sympathy –- it's the rare occasion where every fibre of my being is yearning for the pitchfork. It's like the logic where you catch your spouse cheating, and they kinda know they were caught. But you somehow muddle your way through with even implausible deniability because you both want the relationship to survive and the standard playbook just doesn't allow that.
Assuming it's true, the normal result, and the only result that would allow reconciliation, would be impeachment/resignation and criminal prosecution. The charge is somewhere between thousand-fold negligent homicide up to (but not including) something not entirely unlike Genocide?
But given recent experience, none of that would happen. Imagine Biden becoming President and a second or third wave hitting in early 2021. Then what? People will be out for blood. Would the new admin have the grace and political capital to resist calls for retribution? Or would that just be seen as rolling over, chumps doing good-governance as if nothing had happened, setting themselves up for even worse next time around?
This is a road that leads to only very dark places.
> That's so far beyond the pale it would never even be considered possible in normal times.
Isn't this the other way around? Allocating government resources to swing districts and party constituencies is politics as usual, with typically no real exceptions even for life-saving resources like funding for emergency services.
What's unusual is to see it happening in the middle of a crisis when that is usually the sort of thing to bring people together and put aside party differences. But that's what happens when you destroy all the moderates and make everything into a tribal war.
Absolutely. The Massachusetts tax payers paid for those masks. The Feds stole them. Massachusetts didn't get a reimbursement check for the "seized" masks.
I agree that it should matter. I just meant we don't need to know what warehouse it is in to know it was stolen for reelection purposes. It's disgusting, people are dying directly because of this behaviour.
When you say the Feds, I am finding it hard to believe they even have the capability locally (logistically/politically) to pull this off...doesn't make sense.
Maybe a couple of areas there is an over enthusiastic Trumper in a Fed office...but I doubt many have the balls to tell Governors to fuck off. They have to continue to live in those states you know...
See, I know you think you are being clever, but you're not. Here is the problem.
The fed has dropped the ball already. It needs to show more leadership going forward. The time for the fed seizing PPE procurement and distribution has already passed though, at least in the way they are doing it. The only thing they are doing is taking PPE that is needed now and keeping it away from those that expect to get it.
Basically, the fed are putting on seat belts after the car crash.
>If I were Charlie Baker I would call up the National Guard and tell them to retrieve the masks that were sized by any means necessary. This is an absolute disgrace, and blatant theft by the Feds.
you are not the first to suggest this. and, in fact, the massachusetts national guard defended the shipment from kraft's plane to ensure it was not seized upon arrival.
by all appearances, the federal government is stealing and redirecting life saving and critical equipment on the basis of cronyism and political loyalty. this is an attack on the population of the states being stolen from.
make no mistake: just a bit further down this very road is the dissolution of the union between the states that comprise the country.
Whoa, you got a link about the NG guarding the Kraft shipment? That’s wild!
I don’t think dissolution is in the future because dissolution doesn’t make any sense for anyone. Nobody but Putin’s propagandists want to split up the American geopolitical pie, everybody wants to control the whole pie. The geopolitical conditions just don’t exist for that to happen.
Now we may see some wild intra-federal conflict, for sure, but nobody is going home with anything other than the full prize or nothing. More likely than not, Jonny Reb’s ancestors take a foolish stand and get Sherman’d just like their forefathers.
"Gov. Charlie Baker will greet the NFL team’s plane when it arrives at Logan Airport with Patriots owner Bob Kraft and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito. From there, the state's National Guard will transport the equipment to a strategic stockpile in Marlboro"
The title is misleading. The FBI and DHS are seizing shipments of PPE.
> Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks.
Turns out there is a black market for PPE right now. The FBI should be investigating odd sales, like the one described in the article. Some of them will be black market dealing taking PPE away from hospitals that need it.
This is the part that bothers me...
> But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure.
So, after they showed it was for a hospital and the FBI (who investigates federal crimes like black market deals) was satisfied. The the DoH wants to step in and redirect until a congressional rep steps in. That's the odd part to me.
> The the DoH wants to step in and redirect until a congressional rep steps in. That's the odd part to me.
Not the DoH, DHS, Homeland Security. Whose oversight of the COVID-19 management is being coordinated with Jared Kushner.
It has been heavily implied, sometimes outright stated, that some of these "redirections" are going to states who are "being nice" to the President.
I would be entirely unsurprised to learn that others are going to "battleground" states (in the election sense, not the disease sense). Or to "government authorized private contractors" for resale (with its own due sense of irony).
Well, just read through the other threads here. You'll see that goods are being seized and redirected based on the whim of the President for his friends and allies. This is happening.
A republican fundraiser started Blueflame Medical at the end of March and boasts of being able to fill 100 million orders of masks and PPE. I don't know how he secured these supply lines out of thin air, but I wouldn't be surprised if the federal government is indirectly propping up their stockpile with these seized shipments.
> Asked how he’d managed to procure such equipment when there are shortages in hospitals across the country, Gula said, “I have relationships with a lot of people.”
> Thomas declined to specify how he and Gula had managed to obtain masks that have become so rare that some hospitals have resorted to reusing them or having health care workers tie bandannas or scarfs around their faces. “It’s just relationship-based,” he said. “I can’t say anything else.”
> “I don’t want to overstate, but we probably represent the largest global supply chain for Covid-19 supplies right now,” he said. “We are getting ready to fill 100 million-unit mask orders.”
This last one is the kicker. This guy, who works with/for the Republican party, is able to set up shop in TWO WEEKS, "the largest global supply chain", "based off of relationships", and alarm bells aren't ringing?
I would love for someone to buy masks from Blue Flame, and check lot numbers / serial numbers on those supplies, and see who the original intended recipients were.
I think your statement is true, but I question whether the statement you are replying to is extraordinary given the track record this President and their administration have had since 2016.
Speaking as someone from outside the US, it feels like this story is plausible. The fact is, they have displayed zero accountability for what they are doing with their stockpile.
That is extraordinary in and of itself. Why aren't they transparent about who gets what?
And what about the 500 ventilators that Colorado arranged to purchase, which were diverted by the Federal Government, which then provided 100 to Colorado, while criticizing the "blue" Governor, but praising the "red" senator, saying that the ventilators were the result of the senator's lobbying.
That looks a lot like the exact thing being discussed here.
Evidence should still be demanded before action like lawsuits, impeachments, &c. are considered, but I suggest there's room to call this plausible speculation, rather than an extraordinary claim.
>is extraordinary given the track record this President and their administration have had since 2016
Do you know how many "Trump admin seizes masks" and related corruption stories have been quietly retracted in the last month?
I'm not saying the administration is innocent but it's nearly impossible to accurately evaluate what's going on because almost every media source puts spin on what should be primary source reporting. Even the daily covid briefings receive real time antagonistic headlines from outlets like CNN.
Even in your own example
>FEMA bought 500 ventilators out from under state, governor said last week
So they were outbid at the last second. But all over the thread the sentiment is that they were "seized". Not the first time people's eagerness has opened them to false conclusions influenced by media.
>assume you threw the "quietly" in there to be safe in case someone asks for examples
Why is any comment remotely construable as defending of the current administration automatically presumed to be made in bad faith? The typical internet response to anything related to Trump is completely irrational at this point.
I used the term quietly to emphasize that the damage was done and outlets aren't exactly bending over backwards to broadcast their mistakes on their front pages. I post on mobile so no, it's not trivial to find examples. But you can dig around for the German reported seizure, for example, which turned out to be totally legitimate. Headlines talk about piracy when deep in the article you see that other nations are being outbid legitimately.
Even if these dealings aren't intentional, there is still a problem when outlets suspend goof journalist practices, like vetting, in order to be the first to publish any information critical of the president.
Edit: ironically, it's hard to find anything supportive of my point because even searching with quotes and plus signs, Google and DDG both refuse to return results that actually contain the words I'm searching for (correction, retraction).
The only German stories I can find currently are misleading in a different way. The headlines use words like "piracy" and "seize" when the text indicates legitimate market bidding.
In these cases my point is the same - this may not be wrong enough for a retraction but the misleading negative influence is still accomplished.
At some point we have to trust readers to understand that a headline is just a headline, and it's the most prone part of a news story to editorializing. (since it's the part that's written by an editor) A bad headline is not necessarily indicative of the quality of the story - although you can probably tell that you've picked up a tabloid or something if they're all bad.
> In these cases my point is the same - this may not be wrong enough for a retraction but the misleading negative influence is still accomplished.
In this case, headlines involving piracy are a poor example of the point you're trying to make. The word "piracy" originated from a quote from a German minister, so it's not an example of editorializing gone mad.
If you catch them just deleting a full article, you'll be a hero for the alt-right. They've been complaining about the Iraq war coverage for the last 18 years, and at some point even they start finding it a little odd that there are no more recent example of major errors for something supposedly evil incarnate.
More or less the same applies to other reputable sources.
I believe part of the misunderstanding here is that your accusation, if true, would be far more serious than you believe it to be. Extraordinary claims require evidence of the same magnitude. But because you consider journalists to be routinely lying, you don't see the need for any evidence.
I consider it reasonable to expect people mentioning such a scandal, which they would have read about in the last week or so, to remember one or two details from the story, such as the outlet it supposedly ran in, or the place where it happened.
With the name or a state or hospital, plus maybe the publisher, it should be easy to find someone on twitter or reddit mentioning it, or other outlets picking up on the story (and its eventual fate).
Instead, this thread is now four-deep with meta discussion, but nobody has found a link which would easily settle the matter.
That he found access to 100MM masks and the ability to procure more, that no-one else had? Because if I had 100MM masks for sale and no-one was knocking on my door to buy them now, I'm sure I could drum that up in a good minute or so with a quick communication. But this is just "access to new supply chains".
or:
That it very easily could be resold masks, since we DO know, _for a fact_, that the (federal) government _is_ intercepting PPE and making them available to certain private companies to resell.
“I don’t want to overstate, but we probably represent the largest global supply chain for Covid-19 supplies right now,” he said. “We are getting ready to fill 100 million-unit mask orders.” He being John Thomas the political operative turn business associate of Mike Gula.
(Mike Gula) said he decided to trade in fundraising to sell medical supplies “because nobody was doing it. Because the president and the vice president were asking people to help.”
Judging by plenty of comments here, it's clear that there are too many people who actually are. And if they do question something, they'll question the people who bring this despicable behaviour to attention, because it doesn't fit into their world view - obviously, nobody could ever be that corrupt.
There is a bunch of issues with the US government that this administration has revealed, but I'd really love to see some stronger anti-nepotism laws rolled out, maybe coupled with some anti-dynastic laws to prevent familial repeats with elected officials that came to power in a large part due to legacy.
This is yet another problem that exists largely because our system stabilized at two parties. In a coalition-based system one party being this blatantly and continuously corrupt would risk turning their coalition members against them. As it is, turns out you can just dig in and ignore complaints for years and nothing happens.
Here, sadly, I disagree. I believe a lot of problems arise from having a concentrated two party system but up here in Canada Trudeau #2 the re-trudeauening has happened - now, Trudeau isn't a terrible leader and hasn't felt significantly different from any other Liberal candidate, but nepotism and dynasticism is a problem all across the world when not actively fought against.
>The the DoH wants to step in and redirect until a congressional rep steps in. That's the odd part to me.
Doesn't seem odd to me "we're right, you're wrong and we're not changing course because that would be a tacit admission that you're right and we're wrong" is a pretty standard knee jerk response from government agencies that are used to getting their way.
I suspect that Dr. Artenstein picked up on this right away and that's why he called whichever congressman he called.
LA Times originally reported government seizures of PPE weeks ago.
In separate news from a different source (PBS Newshour), some hospitals are reporting protective gear from state and federal stockpiles that is completely unusable: masks 10 years past its expiration date, masks for children, masks that are rotting [1].
My guess: These two stories are related. The government had enough masks / PPE on paper, but never actually checked it was usable. No one intended this to happen, it just sort of fell through the cracks, and all the paperwork said everything was OK.
Now that huge amounts of physical masks are actually needed, they can't get by anymore on paperwork that doesn't reflect reality.
The stockpile probably has a (not officially acknowledged) main purpose of protecting the essential parts of government if there's an outbreak: soldiers, intelligence, Congress, etc.
Since people actually started physically checking the masks in government stockpiles, behind the scenes bureaucrats have been panicking because they suddenly found out there won't be enough PPE to protect the government, and the market's so tight and the supply chain is so stretched that they just can't simply buy it, there's way too much demand.
So they've decided they need to rebuild the stockpile. The government's reasoning is probably that what really matters is that the "people who matter" in government have what they need. If civilian doctors get sick, and some of them die, that's (seen by government bureaucrats as) an acceptable price to pay to be sure the government itself is protected.
This sounds pretty horrible, but I'm not sure they're completely wrong. For example, what if Russia invades Europe or China lands troops in California next week, the US Army starts to deploy in response, but gets paralyzed by a huge coronavirus outbreak and all available PPE's already been used?
Seems to me like this kind of ethical question should go through the public political process. I'm not sure why they aren't simply honest about why they're doing it. Trying to hide it suggests some bad motive. Maybe it's to hide the original screwup of not checking the stockpile properly. Maybe they have OPSEC concerns about not tipping our adversaries off that this would be a great week to start a war, since the US Military's effectiveness is temporarily crippled by lack of masks.
Anyone know how to file an FOIA request to try to force the government to tell us what's happening to seized masks?
> My guess: The government had enough masks / PPE on paper, but never actually checked it was usable. No one intended this to happen, it just sort of fell through the cracks, and all the paperwork said everything was OK.
No, Republicans in congress very specifically cut the budgets that were supposed to be used to rotate out expired materials. It wasn't accidental, it's a case of refusing to pay the insurance bill and then acting shocked when you're in a car crash.
It also took a big hit from the sequestration, like everything else in the government, but the budget was already underfunded to begin with because DHHS was associated with Obamacare and Republicans wouldn't approve any spending there.
They did the best they could with the money they had and focused on drugs instead of things like masks, which have a harder "cut off" for efficacy and were seen as easier to acquire in the heat of a crisis. But masks eventually have an expiration date too, and if you never rotate them they will eventually go bad too.
> After using up the swine flu emergency funds, the Obama administration tried to replenish the stockpile in 2011 by asking Congress to provide $655 million, up from the previous year’s budget of less than $600 million. Responding to swine flu, which the CDC estimated killed more than 12,000 people in the United States over the course of a year, had required the largest deployment in the stockpile’s history, including nearly 20 million pieces of personal protective equipment and more than 85 million N95 masks, according to a 2016 report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
> “We recognized the need for replenishment of the stockpile and budgeted about a 10% increase,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. “That was rejected by the Republican House.”
> Republicans took over the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms on the Tea Party wave of opposition to the landmark 2010 health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The new House majority was intent on curbing government spending, especially at HHS, which administered Obamacare.
...
> “It just was never funded at the level that was needed to purchase new products, to replace expiring products and to invest in what we now know are the really necessary ancillary products,” said Dara Lieberman, director of government relations at the Trust for America’s Health, a nonpartisan public health advocacy and research group.
The article (which wasn't referenced initially) says the budget was cut by 12% - hardly a catastrophic cut. The parent makes it sound as though the budget was cut completely. Also the article says that under Trump, Congress allocated more funds to the stockpile that was requested, supporting Trump's assertion that "Obama depleted the stockpile".
Quote: "During the Trump administration, Congress started giving the stockpile more than the White House requested."
The title is somewhat clickbait-ish. The FBI and DHS have raided a shipment, which they thought was not meant for a hospital. Once they understood it was meant for a hospital, they let it flow.
Prioritization. Just because it is a hospital that wants to get them does not mean that it was that specific hospital had a higher priority on PPE at that specific time.
Today an unfilled request for PPE from Mount Sinai has a higher priority than an unfilled request for PPE in Boston. Mount Sinai therefore would win against Boston. Boston would win against a small hospital in Erie, PA.
You imply that there is some list of prioritization out there. President Trump has repeatedly maintained that the Federal Government is not in charge of organizing who has what, and that the States should be managing this.
Given this lack of control (or even central organizing), who exactly would be determining who has the priority that you are asserting?
The Admiral Polowczyk whom they brought to run the logistics on coronavirus task force said there's absolutely a prioritization list based on "hotness" of the zone. He said it himself to camera during the briefing number 21(Edit: not 21, it had to be earlier - it was within a few days of the NYC lock down. Maybe that Monday ).
They spent the first week implementing/adapting some DoD system that allowed them to track the pipeline of orders and goods matching the orders to the individual hospital level and if necessary redirect from one to another.
"The Federal Government is not a shipping clerk". The biggest complaint in all of this is that the Federal government is not handling the allocation of these scarce resources, instead forcing states to engage in bidding wars that only enrich suppliers and brokers.
The system is setup to allow for individual players to continue to engage in the commercial transactions however they want as long as the prioritized requests have been satisfied.
Requests are prioritized based on the "hotness" of the requests and a probability of the issuer of the request not being able to find a way to resolve it.
If Mount Sinai (NYC, red zone) needs 20k masks because they are projected to run out in two days ( burn rate 10k/day) and Abington Health (PA, outside Philadelphia, yellow zone) has 20k masks that are heading to it ( its burn rate is 200/day ), the feds will absolutely take it and redirect to Mount Sinai.
On the other hand if Mount Sinai is projected to run out in a week, feds won't touch it.
1. Weeks ago (and still?), tons of people were complaining that the federal government should take over procurement and distribution of medical supplies.
2. Now, the federal government is taking over some procurement and distribution of medical supplies. More complaints on this method.
There are certainly legitimate complaints to be had with state procurement, federal procurement, communication gaps, problems with distribution priority, etc... but I'm left confused as to the shock that the federal government is seizing supplies?
Isn't that what people wanted when they asked for federal government managed procurement+distribution?
If this is a serious question: People wanted the Federal government to act as a single purchaser to source and transparently distribute material to the states, leveraging efficiencies of scale and a view of the whole situation.
No one was asking for the federal government to seize already purchased material and do things with it with zero transparency or accountability.
Well, they didn't actually seize anything here, they figured out that some shipment from China was going to hospitals instead of being intended for resale, then let those hospitals have it once things were straightened out.
The only question is how this transaction got wrongly flagged to begin with.
From the article it sounds like it was a pretty clandestine operation to begin with. He admits to paying 5x the normal prices for the masks, was picking them up in trucks marked as food service, taking different routes, etc. This is exactly the kind of shady transaction the government should be investigating. It could have just as easily been some price speculator buying those masks for all the Feds knew. Once they were assured it wasn't they let it go. The speculation about DHS was a little vague.
The doctor explains at the end of this short interview that he was actually appreciative of the FBI for intervening and why they did:
Parent is a great example of how Republicans constantly lie:
1. Ignoring that POTUS literally told states to fend for themselves on supplies, even pretending he didn’t. Obvious lie.
2. Pretending that the seizure is part of an undeclared federal supply management effort, when it is clearly more likely that these seizures are about political revenge, favoritism, and graft.
This sort of routine lying is positive evidence that all Republicans are in fact aware that their chosen party has descended into rank criminally and that they are knowingly and actively aiding the commission of felonies, i.e. they are guilty of the crime of conspiracy.
To the extent that these Republican antics are going to kill, for the pure sake of political revenge, citizens of blue states and states with Democratic governors, members of the Republican Party should not be surprised if they end up paying a very, very high price in the future.
Consider the possibility that Chinese made PPE is being withheld from Red States to undermine and discredit Republican/Trump support; and is being facilitated for use in Blue States (eg. Illinois) to shore up support for Democratic politicians.
HN: You should have been wearing a seat belt when the car crashed.
Feds: Puts on the seat belt after the car crashed.
HN: That is dumb.
Which is it folks? What seat belt state will satisfy your wishes?
The fed has dropped the ball already. It needs to show more leadership going forward. The time for the fed handling PPE procurement and distribution has already passed though, at least in the way they are doing it. The only thing they are doing is taking PPE that is needed now and keeping it away from those that expect to get it.
The fed so far has made it so we have enough PPE, beds, and ventilators, and brought down the projected death count down more than an order of magnitude. Our test throughput in hotspots far exceeds that of any other country. If that's "failed" I'd like you to elucidate what "success" would look like to you.
> The fed so far has made it so we have enough PPE
We don't have enough PPE. This has been well reported. That's it. Full stop.
> If that's "failed" I'd like you to elucidate what "success" would look like to you.
Not having to lie about being successful would be a start. Also, having in place the things that were dismantled by this administration that they are looking to put back into place in the middle of a crisis.
It's building a fire truck after a fire started because you didn't need it before hand.
Someone close to me has contacts and friends in Hong Kong. One offered to send him a box of masks for free(I think just surgical masks, not N95). The plan was to give a few to friends/family, and his wife's coworkers, who are in-home caretakers for the elderly. The rest would be donated to a hospital or similar. But the box never arrived. It hit customs and was seized.
It sounds like federal agencies are stepping in to investigate and prevent price gouging. Good. That is their job. If this wasn't happening, there would be even less PPE available for hospitals. Of course when you are talking about something at the scale of what is happening in the country right now, there are going to be imperfections in the system, and those imperfections will get reported on. That should not be taken as indicative of the state of things overall, but merely as exception reporting.
The news aspect of event has been incredibly depressing. There are commonly outright lies being presented as if they are valid representations of things that are happening in the world. Sometimes that is simply a part of life, and the consequences are relatively (to this) minimal, but in this situation, this type of reporting is getting people killed.
>It sounds like federal agencies are stepping in to investigate and prevent price gouging
This is not correct. There is overwhelming evidence that the federal government is seizing private supplies of masks for redistribution. I find accounts like this quite chilling, note that the federal agents don't dispute that these are the property of a hospital, it takes (political)force to keep their stuff:
"After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure."[1]
Despite the increase of government enforcement activity, not every price increase constitutes price gouging (no matter how abnormal the price seems).
State laws are toothless and many resign their regulation in the face of an event that lasts for 30+ days, as it accurately suggests the problem isn't going away if it hasn't by then and is probably bigger than the state.
The market has expanded and there is a war for resources.
The price is the market price and is a necessary market signal. Any 2-bit lawyer can defend this now, enjoy. Two the state's attorney general, don't waste public resources on this.
The governments fully capable of creating a price ceiling and subsidizing on top of that.
The market signals are abundantly clear and are a necessary motivating factor to solve the supply constraints.
This headline is somewhat misleading as the shipment in the OP was not seized.
> The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure. I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse.
The actual article does not talk about any PPE being seized by FBI or DHS. It
talks about FBI agents questioning the author when he was inspecting samples
of a shipment of PPE before authorizing purchase, and about his learning that
DHS was considering redirecting the PPE. But it does not say any PPE was
actually seized.
Appreciated! Don't forget that the very same information can be super helpful if you add it as a first comment to the thread. Then you also have more space to explain things such as why it matters, or where in the article it's found, or what else might be important in the article, or related links.
The real question is, will the US voters living in the states which are recipients of the seized PPE be _more_ or _less_ likely to vote for the perpetrators of such malfeasance.
Nurse here. As the epidemic started to get international, I went online and bought a couple boxes of N95 masks, gloves, glasses, and Tyveks. I went to the store and got a few litres of grain alcohol. I told my friends and family this would become a pandemic. They did not believe me.
These items were still easy to find two months ago. What I cannot comprehend is why was I preparing for this when most institutions were not taking this opportunity to do the same.
I question the same. Either hospital supply chains were incompetent or underfunded (or both). Perhaps sacrificed on the recent trend of “lean” in the healthcare system.
194 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadDay by day it is getting harder to understand who are the good guys these days.
It's about power without accountability.
This is not true at all. Congress controls the purse. CBP can ignore all they want, but they would probably be more pliable if they were not getting paid.
Also "...all civil officers of the United States" can be removed directly by the Senate. In practice this is limited to heads of agencies at the lowest but that is just a practice, anyone executing federal power is applicable.
> President Donald Trump likes to tell a story about the U.S. paying out billions of dollars to Iran as part of the multinational deal freezing its nuclear program and easing sanctions against it. What he doesn’t say is that most of that money was Iran’s to begin with. The rest relates to an old debt the U.S. had with Iran.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1
And is heavily involved with Republican heavyweights.
If anyone can explain how a new entrant into supply/distribution of medical equipment was started and got large supplies of critical and scarce equipment that is being actively confiscated by government agencies in orders from other countries/private US companies... I am all ears.
Technically it's more like choosing which doctors and nurses die based on political connections and electoral math, since somebody is still getting the stuff.
Which is still disgusting, but let's not pretend this is operating under a fundamentally different incentive system than the one in which Congress allocates tax dollars. If you want to fix it then fix the whole of it.
So it's not going to them!
It describes an administrator meeting with shady brokers in a hanger at a small airport trying to buy masks contained in two food-delivery trucks.
The FBI checks in. As it should. Sounds shady as hell.
The FBI lets the shipment proceed.
Then the administrator pens a letter with his 'exciting day' story.
Big woop.
Ok... the FBI said everything is on the up-and-up and the trucks are heading out.
"But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE."
Oh no! Our hero has suddenly divined that the entire Department of Homeland Security is planning to swoop in and intercept the trucks (that the FBI just sent on their way.)
What is our hero going to do? Who can save the masks from the nefarious DHS who, I'm sure, were even then sending agents out in black helicopters to finish the seizure that's the hapless FBI agents bungled?
"Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure."
Thank god! Where would we be without our auick-thinking administrator? A single phone call and he has saved the day! But, it wasn't without personal cost...
"I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse."
His angst and concern is moving. He deserves a raise. Where would we be without our hero?
You want to know what really happened? Some cubicle-dwelling administrator drives to a banger, gets scared shitless by FBI agents, and embellishes the story to impress the other cubicle-dwelling adminstrators.
[1] https://www.lyonmag.com/article/106690/quatre-millions-de-ma...
After much diplomacy, 2 millions were released. My guess is that these are the masks meant for Italy and Spain (part of the EU) and that the masks shipped outside of the EU (Switzerland) were requisitioned.
[1] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2020/04/03/la-france-a-t...
What the Federal Government in the US is doing is something different altogether. They're confiscating material within individual states. It's not even clear why they have jurisdiction. They seem to sometimes argue from a default assumption of shipments being destined for the black market, and otherwise simply rely on raw power, FBI badges, and ill-defined emergency powers.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/3-million-masks-ordered-by-mass...
Edit: Removed accidental amp link.
Touchy bunch around here with all the downvotes for helping.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/3-million-masks-ordered-by-mass...
This is yet another example of something that would be the greatest or one of the greatest presidential scandals in US history, but is hardly noticeable given the background level of scandal and distraction.
edit: related example - ventilators, not ppe - with potus tweets on the matter embedded https://www.cpr.org/2020/04/08/colorado-coronavirus-ventilat... edit: other reporting on the matter https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-..., https://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/coronavirus/article241...
Respond to me, don't downvote me. Also, explain how Blue Flame Medical started and got its inventory, and how inventory from Operation Airbridge were procured/where they went.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Gavin-Newsom-s-...
I wish the guidelines contained a statement like, "Downvotes are for posts that don't follow these guidelines, not posts you just disagree with." Downvoting for disagreement seems equivalent to replying "Shut up."
I would interpret it as a more general "nah". The author could then reflect and likely see reasons why someone would disagree.
Reasons for disagreement could be many. Doesn't seem right to shut them up and leave them to guess what the problem was.
I create throw-away accounts (one per device, until I clear cookies, and then a new one). I have one where literally everything I post gets a pile of downvotes. I'm assuming someone's stalking that one and using an army of bots to downvote everything I post, presumably because I offended them at some point.
I think the fix is for a downvote to require a rationale -- you need to state why you're downvoting. Poster learns what not to do. Downvoter needs to do it for a quasi-rational reason.
The internet has a small set of hyperactive people. It has a larger number of people (like me) who don't bother with karma. And a huge number of people who check out and don't participate in discussions. I don't think there's much alignment between the groups, and who you want posting.
The mods / downvoters / etc. are in the hyper-active group, and on most sites, overactive mods tend to lead to echo chambers, and to a lot of people checking out. I haven't left HN because of this (I think the karma minimum for downvoting helps a lot), but I've left many web sites when they became too dumb or too one-sided.
HN hasn't yet gone stupid, but there is a strong correlation between downvotes and political alignment. I'm not so much talking about just left/right, but also libertarian, tech elitist, etc. I think 90% of whether my posts end up +10 or -2 depends on how well they align.
Please don’t take offense, but that includes this post of yours. I don’t need to read this down-vote debate for the 1000th time. This entire comment chain is basically off-topic and breaks the flow of an interesting discussion.
Behold, Word of God: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
> pg: I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
There could indeed be perfectly innocent reasons - but it smells funny.
I don’t see why. A politically well-connected person (previously well-known in their circles for other successful ventures) wants to help get something done; the obvious thing for them to do is to create a new company (for legal reasons, to separate it from their other ventures) and then get people to put money / contracts into it.
See also: Herbert Hoover with Belgium (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/). Which may have more parallels here than it seems.
Here's a detailed account from a hospital administrator in the New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2010025 (Edit: did the linked article change? Anyway: the up-front payment is described in the article, that I somehow managed to link here again).
This one ends well. Others didn't.
Note that this isn't about the money. It's literally life-saving equipment.
The Federal Government has to either take responsibility, take over all purchasing, and distribute the material in a transparent, need-based process.
OR it can tell the states to each do their own thing. They'll outbid each other and end up paying far more than necessary, many will buy more than needed to be on the safe side because the political risk is highly asymmetrical. It's a stupid way to do this, and it will cost lives (and money). But, unlike testing, it's not totally impossible.
What the Federal Administration can't do is tell the states do buy their own supplies, then intercept any shipments and... well, nobody really seems to know what they're doing with it.
The best-case scenario for what's happening is probably just incompetence. If, in six months or so, a gigantic stash of PPE is found in some warehouse, people in the administration will point to that as vindication: see! we didn't intentionally kill anybody.
Second best scenario: Are they giving it back to commercial resellers that happen to be golf buddies with the son-in-law, who then get to sell the same shipment several times? Somehow, commercial distributors seem to be involved. We'll hopefully find out about the why and how in due course.
Nightmare scenario: if the narrative about conservative and swing states receiving far more, both in terms of population as well as disease burden, than blue states turns out to be true... I don't know what happens? That's so far beyond the pale it would never even be considered possible in normal times.
Even assuming it's true, it might actually be preferable to allow them to come up with some face-saving "clerical error" and reverse course. That's assuming they are at least somewhat spooked by these stories coming out now and have belatedly realised the trouble they are in otherwise. Yes, I know that isn't likely to happen.
That's not because I have any sympathy –- it's the rare occasion where every fibre of my being is yearning for the pitchfork. It's like the logic where you catch your spouse cheating, and they kinda know they were caught. But you somehow muddle your way through with even implausible deniability because you both want the relationship to survive and the standard playbook just doesn't allow that.
Assuming it's true, the normal result, and the only result that would allow reconciliation, would be impeachment/resignation and criminal prosecution. The charge is somewhere between thousand-fold negligent homicide up to (but not including) something not entirely unlike Genocide?
But given recent experience, none of that would happen. Imagine Biden becoming President and a second or third wave hitting in early 2021. Then what? People will be out for blood. Would the new admin have the grace and political capital to resist calls for retribution? Or would that just be seen as rolling over, chumps doing good-governance as if nothing had happened, setting themselves up for even worse next time around?
This is a road that leads to only very dark places.
Isn't this the other way around? Allocating government resources to swing districts and party constituencies is politics as usual, with typically no real exceptions even for life-saving resources like funding for emergency services.
What's unusual is to see it happening in the middle of a crisis when that is usually the sort of thing to bring people together and put aside party differences. But that's what happens when you destroy all the moderates and make everything into a tribal war.
Maybe a couple of areas there is an over enthusiastic Trumper in a Fed office...but I doubt many have the balls to tell Governors to fuck off. They have to continue to live in those states you know...
-Feds seize and take over PPE procurements and distribution-
"Why did you steal my masks?"
The fed has dropped the ball already. It needs to show more leadership going forward. The time for the fed seizing PPE procurement and distribution has already passed though, at least in the way they are doing it. The only thing they are doing is taking PPE that is needed now and keeping it away from those that expect to get it.
Basically, the fed are putting on seat belts after the car crash.
It doesn’t really matter what choices were made, if either political party can score points, they will do it.
It doesn't matter what yours was about, it ignored fundamental issues.
you are not the first to suggest this. and, in fact, the massachusetts national guard defended the shipment from kraft's plane to ensure it was not seized upon arrival.
by all appearances, the federal government is stealing and redirecting life saving and critical equipment on the basis of cronyism and political loyalty. this is an attack on the population of the states being stolen from.
make no mistake: just a bit further down this very road is the dissolution of the union between the states that comprise the country.
I don’t think dissolution is in the future because dissolution doesn’t make any sense for anyone. Nobody but Putin’s propagandists want to split up the American geopolitical pie, everybody wants to control the whole pie. The geopolitical conditions just don’t exist for that to happen.
Now we may see some wild intra-federal conflict, for sure, but nobody is going home with anything other than the full prize or nothing. More likely than not, Jonny Reb’s ancestors take a foolish stand and get Sherman’d just like their forefathers.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/02/bob-kraft-patriots-...
Congressional Research Service: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/LSB10121.pdf
Disobeying the commander-in-chief isn't taken too lightly. FYI.
Present situation's already bad. Federalising the Guard would drive it up a notch.
Nothing about the FBI/DHS charter allows them to commit crimes.
> Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks.
Turns out there is a black market for PPE right now. The FBI should be investigating odd sales, like the one described in the article. Some of them will be black market dealing taking PPE away from hospitals that need it.
This is the part that bothers me...
> But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure.
So, after they showed it was for a hospital and the FBI (who investigates federal crimes like black market deals) was satisfied. The the DoH wants to step in and redirect until a congressional rep steps in. That's the odd part to me.
Not the DoH, DHS, Homeland Security. Whose oversight of the COVID-19 management is being coordinated with Jared Kushner.
It has been heavily implied, sometimes outright stated, that some of these "redirections" are going to states who are "being nice" to the President.
I would be entirely unsurprised to learn that others are going to "battleground" states (in the election sense, not the disease sense). Or to "government authorized private contractors" for resale (with its own due sense of irony).
These are serious accusations, and you owe it to the rest of us to provide some serious proof.
EDIT:
And no, politico is not serious, nor does it address this innuendo:
> I wouldn't be surprised if the federal government is indirectly propping up their stockpile with these seized shipments.
http://archive.is/pyVeC
Some choice quotes:
> Asked how he’d managed to procure such equipment when there are shortages in hospitals across the country, Gula said, “I have relationships with a lot of people.”
> Thomas declined to specify how he and Gula had managed to obtain masks that have become so rare that some hospitals have resorted to reusing them or having health care workers tie bandannas or scarfs around their faces. “It’s just relationship-based,” he said. “I can’t say anything else.”
> “I don’t want to overstate, but we probably represent the largest global supply chain for Covid-19 supplies right now,” he said. “We are getting ready to fill 100 million-unit mask orders.”
This last one is the kicker. This guy, who works with/for the Republican party, is able to set up shop in TWO WEEKS, "the largest global supply chain", "based off of relationships", and alarm bells aren't ringing?
I would love for someone to buy masks from Blue Flame, and check lot numbers / serial numbers on those supplies, and see who the original intended recipients were.
Speaking as someone from outside the US, it feels like this story is plausible. The fact is, they have displayed zero accountability for what they are doing with their stockpile.
That is extraordinary in and of itself. Why aren't they transparent about who gets what?
And what about the 500 ventilators that Colorado arranged to purchase, which were diverted by the Federal Government, which then provided 100 to Colorado, while criticizing the "blue" Governor, but praising the "red" senator, saying that the ventilators were the result of the senator's lobbying.
That looks a lot like the exact thing being discussed here.
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/08/colorado-coronavirus-v...
Evidence should still be demanded before action like lawsuits, impeachments, &c. are considered, but I suggest there's room to call this plausible speculation, rather than an extraordinary claim.
Do you know how many "Trump admin seizes masks" and related corruption stories have been quietly retracted in the last month?
I'm not saying the administration is innocent but it's nearly impossible to accurately evaluate what's going on because almost every media source puts spin on what should be primary source reporting. Even the daily covid briefings receive real time antagonistic headlines from outlets like CNN.
Even in your own example
>FEMA bought 500 ventilators out from under state, governor said last week
So they were outbid at the last second. But all over the thread the sentiment is that they were "seized". Not the first time people's eagerness has opened them to false conclusions influenced by media.
I assume you threw the "quietly" in there to be safe in case someone asks for examples?
Well, I doubt you can do anything "quietly" on the internet these days. Have any archive.org links for stories that were later deleted?
Why is any comment remotely construable as defending of the current administration automatically presumed to be made in bad faith? The typical internet response to anything related to Trump is completely irrational at this point.
I used the term quietly to emphasize that the damage was done and outlets aren't exactly bending over backwards to broadcast their mistakes on their front pages. I post on mobile so no, it's not trivial to find examples. But you can dig around for the German reported seizure, for example, which turned out to be totally legitimate. Headlines talk about piracy when deep in the article you see that other nations are being outbid legitimately.
Even if these dealings aren't intentional, there is still a problem when outlets suspend goof journalist practices, like vetting, in order to be the first to publish any information critical of the president.
Edit: ironically, it's hard to find anything supportive of my point because even searching with quotes and plus signs, Google and DDG both refuse to return results that actually contain the words I'm searching for (correction, retraction).
The story that was shared here on the German seizure did not contain enough information that a retraction would be necessary.
In these cases my point is the same - this may not be wrong enough for a retraction but the misleading negative influence is still accomplished.
> In these cases my point is the same - this may not be wrong enough for a retraction but the misleading negative influence is still accomplished.
In this case, headlines involving piracy are a poor example of the point you're trying to make. The word "piracy" originated from a quote from a German minister, so it's not an example of editorializing gone mad.
First, because reputable media sources don't do "quiet retractions". The New York Times has a section for corrections: https://www.nytimes.com/section/corrections
If you catch them just deleting a full article, you'll be a hero for the alt-right. They've been complaining about the Iraq war coverage for the last 18 years, and at some point even they start finding it a little odd that there are no more recent example of major errors for something supposedly evil incarnate.
More or less the same applies to other reputable sources.
I believe part of the misunderstanding here is that your accusation, if true, would be far more serious than you believe it to be. Extraordinary claims require evidence of the same magnitude. But because you consider journalists to be routinely lying, you don't see the need for any evidence.
I consider it reasonable to expect people mentioning such a scandal, which they would have read about in the last week or so, to remember one or two details from the story, such as the outlet it supposedly ran in, or the place where it happened.
With the name or a state or hospital, plus maybe the publisher, it should be easy to find someone on twitter or reddit mentioning it, or other outlets picking up on the story (and its eventual fate).
Instead, this thread is now four-deep with meta discussion, but nobody has found a link which would easily settle the matter.
I stand by my scepticism.
And there's a whole lot of smoke coming from a place that has has historically burned a lot.
That he found access to 100MM masks and the ability to procure more, that no-one else had? Because if I had 100MM masks for sale and no-one was knocking on my door to buy them now, I'm sure I could drum that up in a good minute or so with a quick communication. But this is just "access to new supply chains".
or:
That it very easily could be resold masks, since we DO know, _for a fact_, that the (federal) government _is_ intercepting PPE and making them available to certain private companies to resell.
“I don’t want to overstate, but we probably represent the largest global supply chain for Covid-19 supplies right now,” he said. “We are getting ready to fill 100 million-unit mask orders.” He being John Thomas the political operative turn business associate of Mike Gula.
(Mike Gula) said he decided to trade in fundraising to sell medical supplies “because nobody was doing it. Because the president and the vice president were asking people to help.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/27/republican-fundrais...
They seriously think that we are all unquestioning, credulous simpletons.
Doesn't seem odd to me "we're right, you're wrong and we're not changing course because that would be a tacit admission that you're right and we're wrong" is a pretty standard knee jerk response from government agencies that are used to getting their way.
I suspect that Dr. Artenstein picked up on this right away and that's why he called whichever congressman he called.
In separate news from a different source (PBS Newshour), some hospitals are reporting protective gear from state and federal stockpiles that is completely unusable: masks 10 years past its expiration date, masks for children, masks that are rotting [1].
My guess: These two stories are related. The government had enough masks / PPE on paper, but never actually checked it was usable. No one intended this to happen, it just sort of fell through the cracks, and all the paperwork said everything was OK.
Now that huge amounts of physical masks are actually needed, they can't get by anymore on paperwork that doesn't reflect reality.
The stockpile probably has a (not officially acknowledged) main purpose of protecting the essential parts of government if there's an outbreak: soldiers, intelligence, Congress, etc.
Since people actually started physically checking the masks in government stockpiles, behind the scenes bureaucrats have been panicking because they suddenly found out there won't be enough PPE to protect the government, and the market's so tight and the supply chain is so stretched that they just can't simply buy it, there's way too much demand.
So they've decided they need to rebuild the stockpile. The government's reasoning is probably that what really matters is that the "people who matter" in government have what they need. If civilian doctors get sick, and some of them die, that's (seen by government bureaucrats as) an acceptable price to pay to be sure the government itself is protected.
This sounds pretty horrible, but I'm not sure they're completely wrong. For example, what if Russia invades Europe or China lands troops in California next week, the US Army starts to deploy in response, but gets paralyzed by a huge coronavirus outbreak and all available PPE's already been used?
Seems to me like this kind of ethical question should go through the public political process. I'm not sure why they aren't simply honest about why they're doing it. Trying to hide it suggests some bad motive. Maybe it's to hide the original screwup of not checking the stockpile properly. Maybe they have OPSEC concerns about not tipping our adversaries off that this would be a great week to start a war, since the US Military's effectiveness is temporarily crippled by lack of masks.
Anyone know how to file an FOIA request to try to force the government to tell us what's happening to seized masks?
[1] https://youtu.be/A4YZxctxh8w?t=159
No, Republicans in congress very specifically cut the budgets that were supposed to be used to rotate out expired materials. It wasn't accidental, it's a case of refusing to pay the insurance bill and then acting shocked when you're in a car crash.
It also took a big hit from the sequestration, like everything else in the government, but the budget was already underfunded to begin with because DHHS was associated with Obamacare and Republicans wouldn't approve any spending there.
They did the best they could with the money they had and focused on drugs instead of things like masks, which have a harder "cut off" for efficacy and were seen as easier to acquire in the heat of a crisis. But masks eventually have an expiration date too, and if you never rotate them they will eventually go bad too.
https://www.propublica.org/article/us-emergency-medical-stoc...
> After using up the swine flu emergency funds, the Obama administration tried to replenish the stockpile in 2011 by asking Congress to provide $655 million, up from the previous year’s budget of less than $600 million. Responding to swine flu, which the CDC estimated killed more than 12,000 people in the United States over the course of a year, had required the largest deployment in the stockpile’s history, including nearly 20 million pieces of personal protective equipment and more than 85 million N95 masks, according to a 2016 report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
> “We recognized the need for replenishment of the stockpile and budgeted about a 10% increase,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. “That was rejected by the Republican House.”
> Republicans took over the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms on the Tea Party wave of opposition to the landmark 2010 health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The new House majority was intent on curbing government spending, especially at HHS, which administered Obamacare.
...
> “It just was never funded at the level that was needed to purchase new products, to replace expiring products and to invest in what we now know are the really necessary ancillary products,” said Dara Lieberman, director of government relations at the Trust for America’s Health, a nonpartisan public health advocacy and research group.
Bold claim. Care to support it with a reference?
Quote: "During the Trump administration, Congress started giving the stockpile more than the White House requested."
ProPublica is a highly biased leftist publication as well: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/propublica/, it's also quite literally funded by George Soros.
So if you want to provide "helpful" commentary, please post a less biased source.
Today an unfilled request for PPE from Mount Sinai has a higher priority than an unfilled request for PPE in Boston. Mount Sinai therefore would win against Boston. Boston would win against a small hospital in Erie, PA.
Given this lack of control (or even central organizing), who exactly would be determining who has the priority that you are asserting?
They spent the first week implementing/adapting some DoD system that allowed them to track the pipeline of orders and goods matching the orders to the individual hospital level and if necessary redirect from one to another.
Requests are prioritized based on the "hotness" of the requests and a probability of the issuer of the request not being able to find a way to resolve it.
If Mount Sinai (NYC, red zone) needs 20k masks because they are projected to run out in two days ( burn rate 10k/day) and Abington Health (PA, outside Philadelphia, yellow zone) has 20k masks that are heading to it ( its burn rate is 200/day ), the feds will absolutely take it and redirect to Mount Sinai.
On the other hand if Mount Sinai is projected to run out in a week, feds won't touch it.
2. Now, the federal government is taking over some procurement and distribution of medical supplies. More complaints on this method.
There are certainly legitimate complaints to be had with state procurement, federal procurement, communication gaps, problems with distribution priority, etc... but I'm left confused as to the shock that the federal government is seizing supplies?
Isn't that what people wanted when they asked for federal government managed procurement+distribution?
No one was asking for the federal government to seize already purchased material and do things with it with zero transparency or accountability.
The only question is how this transaction got wrongly flagged to begin with.
The doctor explains at the end of this short interview that he was actually appreciative of the FBI for intervening and why they did:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/04/20/dr-andrew-arten...
1. Ignoring that POTUS literally told states to fend for themselves on supplies, even pretending he didn’t. Obvious lie.
2. Pretending that the seizure is part of an undeclared federal supply management effort, when it is clearly more likely that these seizures are about political revenge, favoritism, and graft.
This sort of routine lying is positive evidence that all Republicans are in fact aware that their chosen party has descended into rank criminally and that they are knowingly and actively aiding the commission of felonies, i.e. they are guilty of the crime of conspiracy.
To the extent that these Republican antics are going to kill, for the pure sake of political revenge, citizens of blue states and states with Democratic governors, members of the Republican Party should not be surprised if they end up paying a very, very high price in the future.
Feds: (attempt to) seize PPE to distribute it elsewhere
HN: The situation where feds seize PPE is dumb, you should be able to procure locally
Which is it folks? What's the set up that will satisfy your wishes?
Meanwhile a quote from gov Cuomo today: "I think the president is right when he says the states should lead", regarding testing.
HN: You should have been wearing a seat belt when the car crashed. Feds: Puts on the seat belt after the car crashed. HN: That is dumb.
Which is it folks? What seat belt state will satisfy your wishes?
The fed has dropped the ball already. It needs to show more leadership going forward. The time for the fed handling PPE procurement and distribution has already passed though, at least in the way they are doing it. The only thing they are doing is taking PPE that is needed now and keeping it away from those that expect to get it.
We don't have enough PPE. This has been well reported. That's it. Full stop.
> If that's "failed" I'd like you to elucidate what "success" would look like to you.
Not having to lie about being successful would be a start. Also, having in place the things that were dismantled by this administration that they are looking to put back into place in the middle of a crisis.
It's building a fire truck after a fire started because you didn't need it before hand.
It's idiotic.
The news aspect of event has been incredibly depressing. There are commonly outright lies being presented as if they are valid representations of things that are happening in the world. Sometimes that is simply a part of life, and the consequences are relatively (to this) minimal, but in this situation, this type of reporting is getting people killed.
This is not correct. There is overwhelming evidence that the federal government is seizing private supplies of masks for redistribution. I find accounts like this quite chilling, note that the federal agents don't dispute that these are the property of a hospital, it takes (political)force to keep their stuff:
"After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure."[1]
1) https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2010025
Despite the increase of government enforcement activity, not every price increase constitutes price gouging (no matter how abnormal the price seems).
State laws are toothless and many resign their regulation in the face of an event that lasts for 30+ days, as it accurately suggests the problem isn't going away if it hasn't by then and is probably bigger than the state.
The market has expanded and there is a war for resources.
The price is the market price and is a necessary market signal. Any 2-bit lawyer can defend this now, enjoy. Two the state's attorney general, don't waste public resources on this.
The governments fully capable of creating a price ceiling and subsidizing on top of that.
The market signals are abundantly clear and are a necessary motivating factor to solve the supply constraints.
> The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure. I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse.
The actual article title is: "In Pursuit of PPE".
The actual article does not talk about any PPE being seized by FBI or DHS. It talks about FBI agents questioning the author when he was inspecting samples of a shipment of PPE before authorizing purchase, and about his learning that DHS was considering redirecting the PPE. But it does not say any PPE was actually seized.
Submitted title was "The FBI and DHS are seizing shipments of PPE intended for hospitals". Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22926309 about not doing that.
These items were still easy to find two months ago. What I cannot comprehend is why was I preparing for this when most institutions were not taking this opportunity to do the same.
It turned out the $10 million/year CEOs aren't quite competent. The same for most of the other rich/powerful.
This PPE was going to this hospital, or another.