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Law360 (March 30, 2020, 4:40 PM EDT) -- The Pentagon announced that it has struck deals with four companies to obtain 8,000 ventilators as part of an "aggressive" partnership with the private industry to address acute medical supply shortages amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The contracts come as part of the U.S. Department of Defense's strategies to rely on its industrial base to "help combat the coronavirus," Lt. Col. Mike Andrews, a DOD spokesman, announced Saturday.
"The department continues to aggressively partner with the defense industry to mitigate impacts from the COVID-19 national emergency," he said.
Michelle McCaskill, a spokeswoman for the Defense Logistics Agency, confirmed that the Pentagon has tapped Zoll Medical Corp., Combat Medical Systems LLC, Hamilton Medical Inc. and VyAire Medical Inc. to produce the ventilators.
The agency expects 1,400 ventilators to be ready by early May and then 1,400 to 1,700 each month after, McCaskill said.
Andrews also said the DOD has partnered with specialty swab manufacturer COPAN Diagnostics Inc. to procure 3 million COVID-19 test-kit swabs.
According to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the swabs were recently flown in from an Italian production site to the Memphis Air National Guard Base to be shipped across the U.S. The Department of Health and Human Services will be directing the shipments, the agency said.
President Donald Trump praised his administration's "historic partnership" with commercial industries to boost production of the breathing machines during a Sunday news conference.
"In the next 100 days, America will make or acquire three times more ventilators than we normally do in an entire year," he said.
In addition to the 8,000 ventilators, the Trump administration wielded the wartime Defense Production Act to force General Motors to produce thousands of ventilators. The move came hours after the company announced it had planned on remaking its Indiana plant to manufacture the breathing machines anyway.
Despite efforts to ramp up ventilator production, states hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic face immediate shortages.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has used his regular news conferences to beg the Trump administration for ventilators. During a March 24 conference, he said the state has 7,000 machines but will need 30,000 when the virus is expected to peak in mid-April.
--Additional reporting by Linda Chiem. Editing by Janice Carter Brown.
Update: This article has been updated with new information from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency about the swab shipments.
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