From The EPOCH Times
A fine example of government waste. You would think that “absolutely outstanding” unused ventilators less than five years old could be useful somewhere in the world.
Beyond that, it’s a fine example of the ways in which our collective response to Covid was expensive AND ineffectual, notwithstanding the fact that Trudeau said “This is exactly the kind of innovative and collaborative thinking we need.”
Health Canada Sells $170M Worth of COVID-19 Ventilators for ‘Scrap Metal’
4/8/2024 Updated: 4/10/2024
COVID-19 ventilators purchased under a $169.5 million contract by Canada’s health agency have been sold as scrap metal, according to government records.
New ventilator parts in unopened shipping cartons bearing the Canadian Emergency Ventilators branding were auctioned off during a three-month period ending in February 2023, according to records obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter. The ventilators were bought by the Public Health Agency of Canada under a sole-sourced contract.
The ventilator parts were sold for as little as $6 a carton out of a warehouse in Concord, Ont., by GC Surplus. The Canadian Emergency Ventilators were listed as “scrap metal.”
“Canadian companies are answering the call,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said back in 2020 when praising StarFish Medical, a manufacturer of Canadian Emergency Ventilators. “This is exactly the kind of innovative and collaborative thinking we need.”
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries scrambled to secure enough ventilators to help those experiencing health complications from the respiratory virus. But the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines, coupled with the discovery that elderly patients did not fare well on ventilators, meant their usage declined in late 2020.
In June 2022, more than 40,000 ventilators the government had ordered earlier in the pandemic were sitting unused in the federal emergency stockpile. Just over 2,000 of them had been deployed in Canada or abroad.
The Department of Public Works would not say how much it paid for the devices, and said in a statement that it did not take delivery of all ventilators it ordered, according to Blacklock’s. A spokesperson added that while the initial value of the contract was $15,820,000, it would not disclose the price per unit or total number purchased to “protect commercial confidentiality.”
In 2020, the House of Commons ethics committee was told the $169.5 million contract allows the government to acquire 7,500 devices, the equivalent of $22,600 per unit. At an industry committee meeting in 2020, StarFish vice president John Walmsley said it had “not been a cheap enterprise.”
“In order to deliver a safe product fast we have paid for contingencies that we have not necessarily needed,” Mr. Walmsley said. “We have custom machined parts in Canada rather than ordering ready-made parts from overseas but we still needed to source some key components internationally.”
Mr. Walmsley also said the company assigned “over 30 design engineers” to speed up development of the ventilators. StarFish Medical said in a 2021 statement that the machines were “absolutely outstanding.”
“StarFish Medical designed a Health Canada certified ventilator in six months, normally a multi-year effort,” it said.
Thanks (I think) for sharing this depressing story.
When I saw "GC Surplus," my first thought was hmm, any relation to GC Strategies? But I see that "GC Surplus" is an 80-years-running Government of Canada entity, so I guess the answer is no.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/protocase-builds-prototype-ventilator-1.5531898
I was involved with a project to produce ventilators at a fraction of the cost of the commercial ones.
We came up with a model that did everything that the others did, at a tiny fraction of the price. They could be put together very quickly with basic parts and equipment, with basically zero lag time.
I spoke with a ventilator salesman just coincidentally on a flight a few months ago, and he said that they made fortunes during COVID, not due to demand but due to projected demand.
It was very interesting to see that there was very high ventilator use and very high death rates in NYC. Whereas no other city in the US came even CLOSE to the same rates of ventilator use, or deaths per capita. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but...
At one point we were being told to put people on ventilators ASAP when they arrived not for that patient's benefit but to create a "closed loop" where they were not passing COVID on to others. Essentially we were endangering individual patients for the theoretical benefit of the collective. Only it turned out we were wrong about that benefit as well.
More or less I see our COVID response as a panicked cluster-fuck, which benefited only grifters who sold us masks, face shields, plexiglass dividers, and things like hyper-expensive ventilators.