NEW YORK - Thirteen years ago, a group of United States public health officials came up with a plan to address what they regarded as one of the medical system's crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators.
The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public health implications to private companies; their focus on maximising profits is not always consistent with the government's goal of preparing for a future crisis.
New division, new mandate In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services established a new division, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, with a mandate to prepare medical responses to chemical, biological and nuclear attacks as well as infectious diseases. The goal was for the machines to be approved by regulators for mass development by 2010 or 2011, according to budget documents that the Department of Health and Human Services submitted to Congress in 2008. After that, the government would buy as many as 40,000 new ventilators and add them to the national stockpile.
Ventilators at the time typically went for about US$10,000 each, and getting the price down to US$3,000 would be tough. But Newport's executives bet they would be able to make up for any losses by selling the ventilators around the world. First job The contract was officially awarded a few months after the H1N1 outbreak, which the CDC estimated infected 60 million and killed 12,000 in the US, began to taper off in 2010. The contract called for Newport to receive US$6.1 million upfront, with the expectation that the government would pay millions more as it bought thousands of machines to fortify the stockpile.
Dr Frieden, who ran the CDC at the time, got a demonstration in a small conference room attached to his office. Newport executives and government officials working on the ventilator contract said they immediately noticed a change when Covidien took over. Developing inexpensive portable ventilators no longer seemed like a top priority.
"Up until the time the company sold, I was really happy and excited about the project," said Mr Hong-Lin Du, Newport's president at the time of its sale."Then I was assigned to a different job."
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