Amidst calls for him to do more to assist local health authorities with getting the lifesaving medical supplies that they need amidst the deadly global Coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has taken to lashing out at those he can use as political targets. That list has included 3M, which he accused this week of carrying on with some kind of nefarious scheme surrounding their mask production — although it’s unclear what exactly he was talking about, because Trump’s tweet never explained beyond insisting that the company “will have a big price to pay,” as if the president is a mob boss. On Friday, 3M CEO Mike Roman insisted that Trump was flatly wrong to accuse his company of any kind of wrongdoing.
He called Trump’s tweet “absurd,” insisting to CNN:
‘The idea that 3M is not doing all it can to fight price-gouging and unauthorized reselling is absurd. The narrative we are not doing everything we can to maximize delivery of respirators in our home country, nothing could be further from the truth. We are doing everything we can to maximize our efforts to fight COVID-19 and to support health workers in the U.S.’
Roman said that his company, which is producing ventilators and the medical masks needed amidst the Coronavirus fight, has spiked their production by millions of units, and they’re currently apparently even importing more into the United States than they’re sending out.
By a longshot, the U.S. currently has the most confirmed Coronavirus cases of any country in the world — although some other locales may have underreported the real toll in their country.
The high U.S. case count has driven a desperate need for supplies. As this week drew to a close, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio even said that New York City, which has been hit hard, only had enough ventilators to last through Monday or Tuesday. In other words, supply restocks are coming down to the wire, and other locales in the U.S. could face steep tolls similar to New York.
In his original tweet about 3M, Trump had belted out:
‘We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks. “P Act” all the way. Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing – will have a big price to pay!’
We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks. “P Act” all the way. Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing – will have a big price to pay!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 3, 2020
Trump has consistently been urged to use the Defense Production Act to order the production of needed medical supplies, which is what he was referring to as the P Act — although he’s intermingled his insistence that he would be invoking the act “against” certain companies with suggestions that medical personnel were hoarding supplies and local authorities were lying about how much they truly needed. There is no evidence — at all — for either of these claims. The staggering confirmed case count in the U.S. and growing death toll confirm the tangible need that Trump seems to have trouble coming to terms with. Medical personnel have denounced Trump’s claims about supposed supply hoarding as “insulting,” although he’s keeping up.
