President Donald Trump

Vice President Mike Pence

Center for Disease Control Director Robert R. Redfield, MD

We, the undersigned, write to you with a great sense of urgency.

Americans are doing all we can to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) – including washing our hands, keeping children home from school, and following the policies of social distancing. But we urgently need more testing to effectively track and prevent its spread. At the same time, we need healthy physicians to fight the virus, but they cannot stay healthy if they don’t have sufficient supplies of medical gear. 

We write to you to demand that you:

• Use the Defense Production Act (DPA) to increase the production of personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators and other vital healthcare equipment. Every hour we don’t implement the DPA risks the deaths of our front-line healthcare workers – our heroes in this time of crisis – and thousands of patients. 

• Exhaust every option available to increase production of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and deploy them to America’s emergency physicians and other frontline providers, such as using the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS)
• Provide more testing kits 

We face a life-or-death situation because you haven’t done enough to support our healthcare workers. Testing is critical because every day spent without proper testing means many more will be affected. The clock is ticking.

The Trump Administration and Congress have not done enough to increase production and prioritize PPE gear distribution to emergency physicians and other frontline providers. We need healthy physicians to fight the virus!

We are asking you to URGENTLY to take every action available to you to increase medical supplies, rather than waiting and hoping for American companies to fill the void.

CC: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar
CC: Admiral Brett Giroir, M.D @HHS_ASH

CC: Office of HHS Inspector General  

CC: National Governors’ Association, Senate and House leaders

Resources

• Cohen. Jom,”The United States badly bungled coronavirus testing—but things may soon improve”, Sciencemag Feb. 28, 2020 , 5:45 PM
• Kenen, Joanne, “How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.”, Politico, 03/06/2020 06:35 PM EST Updated: 03/08/2020 04:30 PM EDT
• Stephen Engelberg, Lisa Song and Lydia DePillis “How South Korea Scaled Coronavirus Testing While the U.S. Fell Dangerously Behind”, ProPublica,March 15, 11:10 a.m. EDT