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Law360 (April 8, 2020, 6:57 PM EDT) -- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday announced $1.1 billion in contracts under a wartime production law for GM and Philips to build more than 70,000 ventilators, a vital medical device for the most seriously ill coronavirus patients.
HHS said that contracts issued under the Defense Production Act will give General Motors Co. about $490 million for 30,000 ventilators that will go to the national stockpile in the coming months and about $647 million to Royal Philips for 43,000 ventilators by year's end.
"HHS will continue awarding contracts to companies for which it has invoked the DPA for ventilator production, while we explore every possible avenue to get life-saving supplies to the front lines of this war on the virus," HHS said in a statement.
While Philips won't finish all of its ventilators until the close of 2020, its contract calls for the delivery of 2,500 ventilators by the close of May, according to HHS.
Royal Philips said in a statement to Law360 that its employees were working at all hours at two U.S. sites to double ventilator production to meet the May target.
The Wednesday announcements came less than two weeks after President Donald Trump officially invoked the DPA to force GM to manufacture thousands of ventilators in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, even though the automaker had already said it would forge ahead with plans to retool an Indiana plant to make the breathing-assistance machines.
Trump again invoked the DPA days later, both to bolster private manufacturers' ventilator production and to force 3M Co. to supply an undetermined number of N95 respirators.
GM said in a short statement Wednesday that it was working with medical device company Ventec Life Systems to make the ventilators.
Wednesday's announcements come as the death toll continues to rise during the COVID-19 crisis, which has caused major disruptions throughout the economy and sent officials at all levels of government scrambling to respond.
By Wednesday afternoon, the United States had around 423,000 confirmed cases, while the U.S. death toll exceeded 14,500, according to Johns Hopkins University.
--Additional reporting by Linda Chiem and Alyssa Aquino. Editing by John Campbell.
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