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Donald Trump Visits Ford Ventilator Plant (PHOTOS)
Donald Trump Visits Ford Ventilator Plant
President Donald Trump visited Ypsilanti, outside Detroit, to tour a Ford Motor Co. factory.
The factory had been repurposed to manufacture ventilators. Ventilators are medical breathing machines. At the peak of the Covid-19 crisis, several US governors begged for ventilators for their health facilities.
Again, President Trump did not publicly wear a facemask during the tour. This is despite a warning from the state’s top law enforcement officer that a refusal to do so might lead to a ban on Trump’s return.
All of the Ford executives giving Trump the tour were wearings masks, the president standing alone without one.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said that mask-wearing isn’t just Ford’s policy but it’s also the law in a state that’s among those hardest hit by the virus. Nessel said that if Trump refused to wear a mask Thursday “he’s going to be asked not to return to any enclosed facilities inside our state.”
In late March, both Ford and G.E announced it will produce 50,000 ventilators in Michigan in the next 100 days and 30,000 a month afterwards.
Manufacturing ventilators is a total departure from Ford’s core business which is building cars and their components
Ventilators are medical equipment that help push oxygen into patients’ damaged or faltering lungs. Essentially, it inflates the organs with air and keeping its air sacs from collapsing.
In the early days of the crisis, Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Esther Whitmer, and other governors and medical workers clamoured for ventilators. They feared that a shortage of machines would prove deadly. This was because the virus made breathing difficult for the scores of afflicted patients who were being brought to hospitals.
However, today, the U.S. now has a surplus of these breathing machines. This has led to Trump describing the U.S. as the “king of ventilators.”
