In segment about ventilators not working, Fox News omits context about a major lapse in federal maintenance
“News”-side anchor Ed Henry simply assures public that ventilators can be fixed
Written by Eric Kleefeld
Published
Fox News gave coverage Thursday to an emerging problem in the coronavirus pandemic: When the federal government is sending ventilators to states in need, it’s turning out that many of these units don’t actually work on arrival and must be fixed before they can get deployed to patients.
But during the broadcast of America’s Newsroom, co-anchor Ed Henry never mentioned a key detail of this story: The New York Times reported yesterday that the federal contract to maintain the ventilator stockpile had run out last summer, leaving the machines simply unmaintained during a months-long dispute between competing vendors. The Times reported that the company that ultimately won the contract did not actually get the task “until late January, when the scope of the global coronavirus crisis was first becoming clear”:
It is not known whether problems with the ventilators predated the contract lapse, but maintenance of the machines did halt. That delay may become a potentially deadly lapse.
“We were given a stop-work order before we’d even started,” said Tom Leonard, the chief executive of Agiliti, which had won the contract to service the ventilators in the stockpile. “Between the time of the original and the time of this contract award, I don’t know who was responsible or if anybody was responsible for those devices. But it was not us.”
Instead of addressing this “potentially deadly lapse,” Henry set out to assure viewers that although “there are reports now that many of those machines being made available by the federal government simply do not work,” the ventilators can indeed be fixed with some quick repairs.
Citation From the April 2, 2020, edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom
ED HENRY (CO-ANCHOR): So let's just break that down. How easy would it be to remedy that? Say a hospital gets 100 of these, and you say there’s a battery problem. Can they fix that relatively easily? In terms of getting a stand, are stands readily available, could this be fixed?
TOM KALLSTROM (CEO, AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR RESPIRATORY CARE): Sure. In fact, I talked to a colleague of mine at New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist today. And what they've done, they've been able to get stands in, he’s had them overnighted to the hospital. As for a dead battery, I imagine they could just be charged up, and then they should be good to go. If not, you’d have to somehow get batteries to back them up.
HENRY: Well, that’s --
KALLSTROM: So for me, the --
HENRY: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but that’s why it’s important to have you on. Because the initial headlines suggest this is a real problem. And there can be some problems. But you’re suggesting, given your insight and long-time knowledge, that these can be fixed, this can be remedied?
KALLSTROM: Yeah, I think so. And I don't know to the degree of which this is happening. Like I said, we're monitoring that. I can tell you that we as an association have been training up respiratory therapists for several years on how to use these ventilators for something like this.
During the segment, Henry also did not acknowledge that crucial time is being lost to these ventilator repairs as hospitals struggle to cope with the coronavirus pandemic.
Indeed, this major lapse in federal preparedness just might be a worthy subject for any potential investigation of the government’s coronavirus response — which Fox News is already laying the groundwork to vociferously oppose.