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National Nurses Day at the White House wasn’t quite the celebration they were expecting.
President Trump paid tribute to the nation’s nurses on Wednesday by scolding one of them for pointing out that U.S. hospitals have faced shortages in protective gear during the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking in the Oval Office after Trump signed a proclamation marking the national holiday, the resolute nurse, Sophia Thomas, said colleagues around the country have reported a problematic lack of personal protective equipment at their overburdened hospitals.
Speaking from personal experience, Thomas said she’s had to use the same N95 mask for “a few weeks now” because of dwindling supplies at her hospital in Louisiana.
“PPE has been sporadic,” she said, “but it’s been manageable and we do what we have to do. We’re nurses, and we learn to adapt and do whatever the best thing that we can do for our patients.”
Trump was not pleased with the reality described by Thomas, who’s the president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners.
“Sporadic for you, but not sporadic for a lot of other people,” Trump grumbled at her.
Thomas tried to go on cleanup duty and chimed in, “Oh no, I agree Mr. President,” but Trump interrupted before she could finish her sentence.
“I’ve heard the opposite,” he said. “I’ve heard that they’re loaded up with gowns now.”
Even though he had been in office for more than three years when COVID-19 hit the U.S., Trump pointed fingers at his predecessor over PPE shortages at the nation’s hospitals.
“Initially we had nothing, we had empty cupboards, we had empty shelves, we had nothing because it wasn’t put there by the last administration,” he said.
Trump insisted that hospital PPE stockpiles have been “tremendous” and mentioned that he visited a mask-producing facility in Arizona on Tuesday.
“They’re making millions of masks a month,” Trump said as Thomas and some other nurses stood silently around him. “It was great.”
A spokeswoman for Thomas said she was not available for an interview Wednesday evening because she was traveling back to Louisiana.
But Pat Kane, the executive director of the New York State Nurses Association, said Thomas was spot on in her initial assessment.
“Thomas had it right when she said access to personal protective equipment had been ‘sporadic,'” Kane told the Daily News. “Here in New York, the epicenter of the coronavirus, supplies continue to be sporadic in some facilities. In fact, half of our nurses surveyed say their PPE is inadequate to this day.”
Trump has for weeks faced scrutiny over his initially halting response to the pandemic and reluctance to use the full power of the federal government to ramp up production of PPE and testing kits.
Also Wednesday, Trump backtracked on his widely-maligned plans to disband the White House coronavirus task force, tweeting that the group will “continue on indefinitely” and add “Vaccines & Therapeutics” to its workload.
Trump and other top administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, said Tuesday that the task force would wind down by Memorial Day and be replaced by a group focused squarely on “reopening” the economy.
The announcement was met by intense pushback, with critics noting that the U.S. coronavirus death toll is still skyrocketing, with nearly 73,000 confirmed deaths as of Wednesday afternoon.
During his Oval Office appearance, Trump confirmed his about-face was influenced by the backlash.
“I thought we could wind it down sooner,” he said, “but I had no idea how popular the task force is until actually yesterday when I started talking about winding down.”
Despite the ever-soaring U.S. death count, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany suggested the Trump administration has done a great job because millions of Americans have not died.
“There were supposed to be 2.2 million deaths and we’re at a point where we are far lower than that,” McEnany said at a briefing, referring to a worst-case-scenario projection in which the government would have done nothing to combat the virus. “And it’s thanks to the great work of the task force and the leadership of President Trump.”
With Michael Gartland
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