The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has signed new purchase orders with seven medtech manufacturers, totaling nearly $1.44 billion, to add about 137,000 ventilators to the national stockpile by the end of the year.
Five of the seven contracts—issued to Medtronic, GE Healthcare, Hill-Rom, ResMed and Vyaire Medical—were delivered under the Defense Production Act, which requires those devicemakers to prioritize the government’s requests before filling other orders. The other two were delivered to Zoll and Hamilton Medical.
When added to its previous $1.1 billion in purchases from Philips and automaker General Motors, HHS said it expects to acquire nearly 30,000 new ventilators by the end of May.
“We are grateful to the patriotic Americans at companies working around the clock and retooling factories to increase ventilator production,” said HHS Secretary Alex Azar. “The thousands of ventilators delivered to the Strategic National Stockpile starting this month, continuing through the spring and summer, will mean we have more capacity to respond to the pandemic as it evolves.”
Individually, the contacts include waves of delivery deadlines for early May and early June, with their totals set for early and mid-July:
- Hamilton netted $552 million for 14,115 ventilators by July 3.
- Vyaire landed $407.9 million for 22,000 by June 29.
- Zoll will collect $350.1 million for 18,900 ventilators made by July 3.
- GE will receive $64.1 million for 2,410 ventilators produced by June 29.
- ResMed gets $31.98 million for 2,550 by July 13.
- Hill-Rom’s $20.1 million contract covers 3,400 completed by July 13.
- And Medtronic will be paid $9.1 million for 1,056 ventilators by June 22.
Last week, Medtronic said it is shipping more than 300 of its Puritan Bennett ventilators per week worldwide and plans to increase that number to 400 by the end of April and to over 700 by the end of May. In late March, Zoll said that it plans to expand its ventilator manufacturing capacity by 25-fold to 10,000 per month.
Meanwhile, GM said the first batch of ventilators produced on its assembly lines, in collaboration with Ventec Life Systems, are ready for delivery. More than 600 will be shipped from its recently transformed factory in Kokomo, Indiana, this month, the automaker said, with the full order of 30,000 ventilators to be completed by the end of August.