Subject:
Background Press Call on the President's Strategic National Stockpile Announcement
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 14, 2020
Via Teleconference
…
Basically, we’re in a time now where we’re crossing a great threshold where we’re starting to have a lot of supply in the country and we’re focusing on the reopening. We’re focusing on getting more supply into the country. We’re focusing on building capacity. And we’re focusing on redoing the Stockpile, based on everything that we’ve learned over the last couple of months, to make sure that the country has increased preparedness and increased ability to move forward.
''Starting with where we were after the 2009 pandemic, they did not restock the Stockpile. They depleted a lot of the masks. So we had a combination of a low stockpile, a lot of the materials are not made in America, and then also the Stockpile didn’t have enough of the SKUs that are needed to deal with a pandemic. The number that we have is, only 28 percent of what was needed for a COVID patient was actually in the Stockpile. And on the shelf, which was not replaced, you only had one to three weeks of supply for different supplies.
So what we’re doing today is we’re going to be touring Owens & Minor in Pennsylvania. That’s one of the distribution facilities that helped do a lot of great work that we had. It helped us identify a lot of the needs throughout the country and then also distribute it.
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