"The Strategic National Stockpile's role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Later that same day, the language on the website’s homepage was changed to emphasize the states’ roles in finding their own supplies: When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency." Department of Health and Human Services website described the stockpile this way: "Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out. When we looked on the morning of April 3, the U.S. The location of the $8 billion stockpile is secret. It expanded to respond to terrorism attacks, hurricanes, the H1N1 flu and ebola. The Strategic National Stockpile was first created in 1999 and started out in response to preparing for chemical, radiological, biological or nuclear attacks. The Strategic National Stockpile is intended to help the states "For all emergencies you deplete local resources and recruit new resources in an escalating hierarchy before going to the feds." "Cities, counties, states and the nations have a cascading responsibility for disasters," he said. Kushner’s comments about the federal stockpile prompted critics to note that the federal government’s own description of the national stockpile stated that when "state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency." By the next day, the federal government changed its online description of the stockpile.Īli Khan, a University of Nebraska epidemiologist and former director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, called Kushner’s comments a "semantics issue." Kushner added that the job of the federal government is to make sure it gets real data from cities and states so "that we can make real-time allocation decisions based on the data." "So, what you have all over the country is a lot of people are asking for things that they don’t necessarily need at the moment," he said. Kushner’s point was that local officials are requesting items that they don’t need.įor example, Kushner said a hospital asked a congressman for 250 ventilators even though there were no COVID-19 patients in the counties near that hospital. (At the time, the website about the stockpile flatly contradicted him.)īut Kushner made other comments during the press conference that showed he knows the national stockpile is used to help provide states with supplies such as masks or ventilators. Read in isolation, Kushner’s statement sounded like he wasn’t familiar with the purpose of the national stockpile, which is clearly to help states in an emergency. "It’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use." "You also have a situation where in some states, FEMA allocated ventilators to the states and you have instances where in cities they’re running out, but the state still has a stockpile and the notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile," said Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, April 2. In a White House COVID-19 briefing, Jared Kushner picked up on President Donald Trump’s theme that the states should do more to obtain medical supplies rather than rely on the federal stockpile.
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