When the Wuhan coronavirus first swept over the country earlier this year, the Trump administration delivered life-saving ventilators to states that failed to keep their own strategic supplies.
The administration also replenished badly depleted emergency stockpiles from the Strategic National Supply, a problem Trump pandemic officials inherited from the Obama administration.
In the words of Reps. James Comer, R-Ky., and Michael Cloud, R-Texas, “no person who needed a ventilator went without one.”
But that hasn’t stopped House Democrats from attacking the administration’s Wuhan virus response, or blaming the failures of the Obama administration and Democratic governors on President Donald Trump.
A new media-ready report shamefully rewrites the history of the pandemic response and casts Trump as the villain rather than the man who rose to the occasion, according to Comer and Cloud.
Both GOP congressmen are members of the House Oversight committees, where Comer is now the ranking GOP member following the transfer of Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, to the Judiciary Committee and his replacement, former Rep. Mark Meadows, R-NC, becoming Trump’s chief of staff.
Cloud serves as ranking minority member of the subcommittee for economic and consumer policy.
Both congressmen said they are promoting a series of facts to combat the false narrative.
“The Democrats’ latest report shows they will stop at nothing in their endless quest to politicize this pandemic,” they said in a joint statement on Friday.
“After months of Democratic governors begging for more ventilators, congressional Democrats are now unhappy with the administration’s successful efforts to quickly secure a robust supply of ready to use ventilators,” Comer and Cloud continued.
The congressmen cite how Democratic governors in states like New York, California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Washington and Michigan were clamoring for ventilators even as they publicly trashed the president.
Rather than keep pace with Washington’s ventilator needs, costing roughly $15,000 to $25,000 per life-saving device, Gov. Jay Inslee spent more than $1.1 billion on programs for orcas in the Pudget Sound.
For years, New Jersey governors wasted huge sums on Hollywood tax giveaways and “green” energy schemes, while New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo opted to prioritize countless billions of taxpayer-funded projects to appease his Democratic supporters.
In every case, the governors were warned by their own administrations that they were in critically short supply of ventilators and personal protective equipment, or PPE.
They ignored those warnings and chose to blame the Trump administration, even as it helped save their respective state residents—including many who suffered in nursing homes thanks to horrendously poor judgment from Democrat state leaders.
“President Trump and his team deserve credit for more than quadrupling the supply of available ventilators in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) since March,” Comer and Cloud said.
They also decried the smearing and bullying of a private-sector medical device producer that worked with the Trump administration to help deliver emergency equipment.
The Democrat report attacks the company “without undertaking some of the most basic investigative steps to ensure they get the facts right,” according to Comer and Cloud.
The report rips the Phillips company for not producing ventilators under a 2014 research and development contract that hinged on FDA approval.
On top of depleting the nation’s strategic supply of ventilators, the Obama-led FDA never authorized the Phillips contract. But the House Democrat report holds the company responsible.
In July 2019, long before the Wuhan virus pandemic, the Trump FDA approved the 2014 contract and exercised an option months later to purchase new ventilators at a reduced cost to resupply the national stockpile.
But House Democrats portray the relationship between Phillips and the Trump administration as corruption.
“The manner in which Democrats have conducted this investigation should be a harbinger to any company called before the Oversight Committee,” Comer and Cloud said.
“Companies that receive an oversight letter from Democrats should be on notice that the majority will misconstrue, cherry-pick, and misrepresent their information and data,” they continued. “There is no incentive for the private sector or government to engage with Speaker Pelosi’s House,” they concluded.
