Thursday, April 30, 2020

After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/after-one-tweet-to-president-trump-this-man-got-69-million


On March 27, as emergency rooms in New York and across the country began filling with coronavirus patients struggling to breathe, President Donald Trump posted on Twitter to urge Ford and General Motors to “START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!”
One of the thousands of replies that the tweet attracted struck an equally urgent tone: “We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT.”
Its author was Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley. A specialist in mobile phone technology, he currently has just 75 followers on Twitter and no apparent experience in government contracting or medical devices.
 But three days later, New York state paid Oren-Pines $69.1 million. The payment was for 1,450 ventilators — at an astonishing $47,656 per ventilator, at least triple the standard retail price of high-end models.
 
Not a single ventilator ever arrived.

2 comments:

  1. Pretty sure Chazal would've called this price gouging.
    On the other hand, there was an immediate need for ventilators and no one else was providing them. This guy came through when the big companies didn't. Probably saved lives.
    Verdict?

    ReplyDelete
  2. pretty sure they would call it theft.

    ReplyDelete

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