“Project Airbridge” was a YUGE success for the fight against coronavirus, the Trump administration tells us, emphasis on ”was,” as the program is largely ending. The federally funded flights allowing private companies to bring personal protective equipment from other countries to the U.S. and sell them at market rates, with half going to federal priority areas and half wherever the companies chose, will end, with the exception of some bringing over protective gowns.
First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner’s signature project, the results of Airbridge were kept mostly secret, with states either not knowing or not being allowed to tell if they’d gotten any of its results. Meanwhile the administration regularly lied about the amounts of PPE arriving in the U.S. through the program, and gave lavish credit to Kushner's privatized group of inexperienced volunteers drawn from the ranks of high-end consultants and private equity firms.
Now we’re told it was “so successful at delivering massive amounts of critical supplies to the American people, that now there’s enough PPE in this country for us to return to the sea bridge method we used before Coronavirus,” according to White House spokesman Hogan Gidley. Medical workers and others on the front lines don’t agree with either the assessment that there’s enough PPE now or that Project Airbridge was so successful.
”From the start, Project Airbridge has done nothing to increase American manufacturing of [personal protective equipment] or even global production of PPE,” a spokesman for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee emailed NBC News. “It has only continued our reliance on foreign supply chains. It is both a public health and national security concern that we cannot manufacture the protective equipment necessary to keep Americans safe.”
Would the need for PPE have been so dire, for instance, if the Trump administration had responded to a U.S.-based N95 mask manufacturer’s offer to expand production starting in late January?
Now we’re left with ongoing shortages—if you listen to doctors and nurses and first responders rather than to the Trump administration—and the outcomes of the administration’s efforts having been focused on foreign sourcing rather than increasing domestic production. Fab.