During the first weeks of the COVID-19 "pandemic" in 2020, when nationwide protocols were setup to be used in hospital settings, some frontline doctors began to question the practice of putting COVID-19 positive patients on ventilators, because so many of them were dying, and these doctors made it clear that they were dying from being wrongly placed on these ventilators.
In other words, the ventilators were actually killing them, in many cases by collapsing their lungs.
But the hospital protocols never changed, mainly because hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. Government and The CARES Act passed by President Trump, gave financial incentives for companies to produce more ventilators, and for hospitals to use them.
All of that money would have been lost if they changed the hospital protocols.
President Trump enacted the Defense Production Act in order to give government funds to manufacturers to produce ventilators, and gave $1.1 billion to GM and Philips to mass produce ventilators.
ProPublica reported how one of those companies, Philips, had already received $13.8 million five years earlier from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to produce low-cost ventilators to stockpile in the case of a national pandemic, but when COVID hit, there were none to be found.
And now earlier this week, FierceBiotech is reporting that Philips has been recalling about 5.5 million of their ventilators for the past year-and-a-half, because the ventilators are faulty and are killing and injuring people.
The recall began after Philips received dozens of reports describing how the polyester-based polyurethane foam used to muffle sound and vibrations in many of its respiratory devices could break down over time, sending potentially dangerous chemicals and debris into the airway—though documents submitted in court have since revealed that Philips knew about the foam breakdown issue at least a few years before beginning the formal recall.
