WASHINGTON, D.C. — Personal protective equipment, or PPE, is a term we’ve all been forced to become familiar with since the coronavirus started spreading.
- There continues to be a need for PPE for medical professionals
- Bipartisan agreement that the federal government has fallen short
- Ohio lawmakers working their connections to help make up difference
Concerns about shortages of the lifesaving gear is something Ohio lawmakers — Democrat and Republican — are hearing a lot about and working to address.
“This morning I’ve been touching base with health commissioners around our district, and the one I just got off the phone with said that his focus is making sure they have enough PPEs,” Representative Jim Jordan (R, 4th Congressional District) said in a phone interview on Monday.
“If you look at what we have, we have the actual componentry to help create,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D, 9th Congressional District) said in a FaceTime interview last week. “Why can’t we make masks? Why can’t we make gowns? Why can’t we make ventilators that are beyond anything that’s been created before? Akron, Cleveland, the whole northeastern Ohio area is known for plastics. We should be doing this yesterday!”
Businesses across Ohio are stepping up where the federal government and the Strategic National Stockpile have fallen short.
Columbus-based Battelle is now sterilizing thousands of medical masks a day, while nearby Cardinal Health has donated over two million non-surgical gowns to the government.
Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) helped fast-track the federal approval both companies needed.
“There are some interesting private sector partnerships building up that are helping to ensure that we have adequate PPE, but again, there’s not enough,” Portman said in a phone interview last week. "And nobody was adequately prepared — no state, certainly not the federal government. And so we all have to work together to close that gap.”
Members of Congress can have a certain amount of influence in this department. They can pretty much get any Ohio medical or business leader on the phone; they can write letters to the Trump administration; and they can introduce legislative solutions — all things Ohio’s lawmakers have been doing.
But there’s still enough of a problem that some nurses have emailed our newsroom to say they are struggling to get the protective equipment they need.
“I’ve spoken with [Ohio] Governor [Mike] DeWine repeatedly about — and a number of companies in Ohio and across the country that could scale up and transition or retool into personal protective equipment, but there is no, sort of, White House involvement in this,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said in a video conference interview earlier this week.
Democrats and Republicans disagree on who to points fingers at, but every lawmaker I’ve spoken with acknowledges that the federal government was not prepared for a crisis like this.
And even though Congress has approved hundreds of billions of dollars to address the immediate shortage of PPE, a lot more will have to be done to be ready next time.
“My plan, as we get through this, is to really have the federal government be a partner in incentivizing essential public health manufacturing,” Rep. Tim Ryan (D, 13th Congressional District) said in a FaceTime interview on Thursday. “All of these things, now, we rely on other countries. And we see, now, why we can’t do that.”
