Meanwhile, some federal health department officials not involved in the effort saw it as a Band-Aid on the much larger problem of coronavirus testing shortages. “This was like a PR project cooked up so Trump could have something to tout,” said one official in the health department, whose team was also working to address the Covid-19 crisis and worried that the drive-thru plan was sapping focus from longer-term initiatives.
But the top officials who worked on it, like Boehler and Smith, experienced it as a crash course in the intricacies of Covid-19 testing and described it as akin to their experiences standing up new businesses.
Retailers have echoed the Trump administration line. For instance, Walmart’s Bartlett said that the giant retailer’s two pilot sites in March provided a real-time learning lab, teaching Walmart how to position the sites and its own personnel, figure out how many supplies are needed — even how to deal with complex interplay of local, state and federal regulations, like what to do with the biowaste generated by the testing.
While Walmart’s initial drive-through sites needed as many as 15 staff per location, its sites now require as few as two or three staff. The retailer last week launched mobile testing units too.
CVS, which launched its own pilot site in Massachusetts on March 19, says the public-private partnership prepared it for the massive rollout of self-swabbing tests it’s aiming to make available in up to 1,000 stores this month.
“Our team worked around the clock to open a test site six days after the Rose Garden announcement, then used those learnings – and newly-available technology – to change our strategy and dramatically increase testing capacity,” spokesperson T.J. Crawford said. The company is now moving toward a goal of performing up to 1.5 million tests per month on its own.
Overhauling supply lines
The team’s operations swiftly shifted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s squat headquarters on March 19 and began focusing on supply-chain overhauls, such as developing the “Project Airbridge” supply-flights to rapidly bring tens of millions of medical supplies from overseas into the United States, rather than waiting for the products to be shipped by sea, and working to encourage private-sector companies to spin up production of ventilators and other devices.
Team members said that the stakes felt especially dire, as doctors in Italy were reporting shortages that were forcing them to ration ventilators, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was insisting that his state needed tens of thousands of ventilators in order to avoid a similar fate.
“You really felt the impact of the work we were doing,” said one team member. “We were making decisions where it felt like hundreds or thousands of lives were at stake.”
That supply work would become even more politically sensitive as the White House battled with states over its role in procurement, and Trump sought to position the federal government as a “backup” to local officials.
“We don’t need a backup. We need a Tom Brady,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee told Trump on a March 26 conference call with governors. The widely publicized comment, which Trump later addressed in a press briefing, was focused on Inslee’s concerns about a shortage of coronavirus testing swabs in Washington state, said one person with knowledge of the call. Giroir and other officials reached out after Inslee’s complaint, but more than a month later, Washington state officials warn they still have concerns about swab shortages.
“We’ve been disappointed by how slowly the administration has come to the realization that supplies are the key problems with testing,” said Katims, the Washington state liaison. “It spoke to a misunderstanding of where the lab challenges are.”
Other governors decided to take the supply issue into their own hands. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and his wife, a native Korean speaker, on March 28 began a dialogue with South Korean officials to acquire hundreds of thousands of tests for his state, a spokesman for Hogan said. The test kits arrived three weeks later — and Hogan had them flown to a Baltimore-area airport and protected by the National Guard, fearing that federal officials would find a way to confiscate them.
Faced with angry governors, administration officials said the rescue team was making a rational choice: it was impossible for the federal government to be the national supplier. “There was an initial reticence to own the issue federally because the capacity was at the state and local level, and we didn’t initially have the federal resources to meet demand,” said an administration official with insight into the plan. “No matter how well you did, we also knew it was never going to be considered good enough.”
Meanwhile, the Kushner team began to draw attention as a “shadow task force,” unfavorably compared to the televised briefings that Trump and his key deputies gave from the White House every day. One watchdog, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, warned that the group’s use of “private email accounts with no assurance their communications are being preserved” appeared to violate federal records laws.
Democratic skepticism about the group hardened, as members of Congress looked for possible financial conflicts and focused intently on the role of Kushner.
“Our first concern is that Jared Kushner — President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor — has been managing a ‘shadow task force’ of key government officials and private sector actors tasked with coordinating the private sector response,” Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Tom Carper and Richard Blumenthal wrote last month to the White House’s top ethics official. The Democrat-led House Oversight Committee also has looked into the role of roughly two-dozen volunteers from cancer-technology firm Flatiron Health, private-equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, and investment fund Insight Partners.
The growing intense spotlight unsettled some team members, who worried that the role of the private sector volunteers — who some officials had flagged to the media for using personal emails — had been overblown. “They had nothing to do with contracting, and they’d leave the room anytime there was a sensitive conversation,” said one person with knowledge of team operations. Overall, the private-sector volunteers accounted for just 10 percent of all people working on the team’s efforts, estimated two team leaders, who said the volunteers’ work largely focused on analysis and sourcing calls. The team instead was mostly staffed by officials at FEMA, HHS and the White House, including some of Boehler and Smith’s own deputies, as well as dozens of federal contractors.
The harsh scrutiny also rankled White House officials, who worry it’s putting politics over public health. “In the face of this unprecedented crisis, these volunteers dropped everything to help our country,” said Boehler. “I’m proud of them.”
“It wasn’t a shadow task force,” Kushner said, adding that he was on the White House’s coronavirus task force led by Vice President Mike Pence, who encouraged him to coordinate innovation efforts between the White House and the health department. “I think people have made this with more mystique than it actually has.”
An April-long push for more testing
At the end of March, Trump had extended the White House’s social-distancing guidelines through the end of April, which team members took as a signal: be prepared for the economy to re-open by May.
“We knew there was a good chance that we’d need to get a lot more testing capacity online in May,” said one official involved in the team’s preparations. “But unlike the drive-thru project, where we had a few days, we had weeks of runway to plan for it.”
Team members on April 1 began working to identify total lab-testing capacity, interviewing dozens of companies to develop projections for how much diagnostic testing would be coming online. The group also met with outside experts like Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s former FDA commissioner who had outlined a plan for re-opening the economy that depended on having sufficient testing available.
A new testing task force then kicked off on Monday April 6, with White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx soon joining the effort to provide more clinical expertise, and team members began reaching out to a slew of firms to identify and source potential products. For instance, U.S. Cotton changed production of its existing Q-tip swabs at an Ohio factory into a swab that could be used for specialized Covid-19 testing, with the coronavirus rescue team working with the FDA to speedily win permission to use the devices.
Source: politico.com
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