The view from inside major medical centers
Nor is there – I'm sure in Secretary Leavitt's 43 of 50 states that he has been to – he must have heard before the issue of, yes, ventilators can't be provided to all local facilities, but how can local facilities, as my colleague from The Cleveland Clinic said, decide to take on an institution and fill it with ventilators that aren't going to be used. That is simply too challenging I think in this day and age, and a very important thing to consider as part of the push supplies that are supposed to come from the federal government in the first 12 hours.
So what we have tried to focus on at National Jewish is our areas of expertise, which relates to both pulmonary medicine and immunology so that we have developed and are utilizing some of our most senior professors, as well of a substantial part of research capacity for a respiratory bio-defense initiative, where we could serve as a local and potential national research for the issue of respiratory bio-defense because obviously the lungs are a primary entry point for any particular noxious event. And so we have been focusing our respiratory bio-defense initiative on potential treatments for radiologic entry, new molecules for the treatment of chemical attack. The issue has been focused in our immunology department in making innate or your own immunity in the lungs more enhanced, whether it be safer vaccines, more effective vaccines about both viral agents as well as anthrax and other bacterial agents. So that is what we have been focusing on recently.
KELLY: Picking up on that point – I'm going to move this around a little bit. And please, any other members of the panel, just jump in. But picking up your point, Michael and Frank, is an unfair burden being put on private-sector hospitals? I mean, is the expectation now really out of whack with reality in terms of what you're dealing with at Cleveland, for one example?
PEACOCK: You know, we have spent the last three years working hard stockpiling ventilators and doing all of that sort of thing. I think we are as prepared as anybody in the nation, but we don't have beds, and that is really what it comes down to. And to ask any industry to double it's productive capability with no funding is really a hard row, even if you were a wealthy industry, and the hospital industry is not wealthy. I mean, that is the mis-stereotype here. Hospitals are closing for real reasons. And to say, well, you have to double your infrastructure and all of these capital expenses and just tough it out won't do well, and nothing gets done in that situation. If the federal government doesn't help run this, it's really a lot to ask for the local people.
KELLY: Ed Miller, you I think have the biggest budget here so let me ask you – [laughter]. Who pays for all of this?
MILLER: Well, we have gotten – over the last three years, we have gotten about a million dollars from the federal government for it. But we put about 10 million in ourselves. And it comes out of other programs that we're not funding. So there is no question that we have shifted our priorities and done that. But this is not a sustainable business plan.
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