White House: US planning to ship 8,000 ventilators abroad

President Donald Trump, who's taken to calling the US the king of ventilators, is making plans to ship 8,000 of the breathing machines to foreign countries by the end of July to help in their fight against the coronavirus.

That's a long way from the early days of the virus when US medical workers were wondering if a shortage of ventilators would force them to make painful decisions about which patients would get them.

Now, the US has a surplus and the president is sharing them with other countries a goodwill gesture that also helps him offset criticism about his own early response to the pandemic.

The White House did not respond to a request for specifics about how many ventilators have been sent so far, or the criteria for determining which countries will get them. But an administration official familiar with the effort provided the 8,000 figure as part of a list of actions aimed at supporting health systems abroad. The official was not authorized to discuss the projection publicly and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

We have nine factories that are throwing out ventilators at numbers that nobody can believe. There's not been anything like that since the Second World War, Trump said Friday.

Trump said the US was giving the breathing machines to some countries. It was unclear if some nations would pay for the ventilators, which cost $5,000 to $30,000, depending on the model.

In a certain way, I'd like them to be donations. I really do. I think it's good will, Trump said earlier in the week.

It's hard to say you have to pay us in order to save people from dying. The machines shipped to other countries do not come from the national stockpile, which has about 12,000 ready to be deployed to U.S. jurisdictions.

The U.S. stockpile, which is maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services, is being replenished with thousands of ventilators manufactured under the Defense Production Act.

Initially, it was very scary and we had a lot of states requesting numbers that could not be supplied, Jared Kushner, an adviser to the president and Trump's son-in-law, said Friday during a White House meeting with Republican members of Congress.

The president wanted to make sure that anybody in this country who needed a ventilator would get a ventilator. He saw what was happening in Italy, where people were dying in hospitals and not able to get the care they needed, and the president said 'I don't want that to happen in America.'