#Nice clock bring it by the white house professional

But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. 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. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. We opened several boxes, examined their contents, and hoped that this random sample would be representative of the entire shipment.

Upon arrival, we were jubilant to see pallets of KN95 respirators and face masks being unloaded. We went anyway, since we desperately needed any supplies we could get. Hours before our planned departure, we were told to expect only a quarter of our original order. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Three members of the supply-chain team and a fit tester were flown to a small airport near an industrial warehouse in the mid-Atlantic region. Having acquired the requisite funds - more than five times the amount we would normally pay for a similar shipment, but still less than what was being requested by other brokers - we set the plan in motion. Despite having cleared this hurdle, we remained concerned that the samples might not be representative of the bulk of the products that we would be buying. We received samples to confirm that they could be successfully fit-tested. The latter were KN95 respirators, N95s that were made in China.

#Nice clock bring it by the white house professional

After several hours of vetting, we grew confident of the broker’s professional pedigree and the potential to secure a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators.

Then we got lucky, but getting the supplies was not easy.Ī lead came from an acquaintance of a friend of a team member. Deals, some bizarre and convoluted, and many involving large sums of money, have dissolved at the last minute when we were outbid or outmuscled, sometimes by the federal government. These employees have adapted to a new normal, exploring every lead, no matter how unusual. Our supply-chain group has worked around the clock to secure gowns, gloves, face masks, goggles, face shields, and N95 respirators. It’s worth reading the correspondence, written by an executive running a small health system, at some length: The NEJM, which featured the letter in its COVID-19 Notes series, is far from a platform of partisan alarm or hysteria - it is among the most sober and high-minded professional journals in the country. Yesterday, a letter published by the New England Journal of Medicine highlighted the extraordinary measures that had to be taken to secure the delivery into Massachusetts of equipment that had been bought and paid for. In a time of pandemic, having evacuated federal responsibility, the White House is functionally waging a war against state leadership and the initiative of local hospitals to secure what they need to provide sufficient treatment. At the very least, federal authorities have made governors and hospital executives all around the country operate in fear that shipments of necessary supplies will be seized along the way. Over the last few weeks, it has started to appear as though, in addition to abandoning the states to their own devices in a time of national emergency, the federal government has effectively erected a blockade - like that which the Union used to choke off the supply chains of the Confederacy during the Civil War - to prevent delivery of critical medical equipment to states desperately in need. Whenever you start to think that the federal government under Donald Trump has hit a moral bottom, it finds a new way to shock and horrify. It’d be a shame if anything happened to them.