WASHINGTON — White House Senior Adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner made his White House coronavirus briefing debut on Thursday, announcing he’d secured a month of N95 masks for Big Apple hospitals.
President Trump asked Kushner to become involved in the government’s coronavirus response several weeks ago and is now running his own task force looking for “outside the box” solutions, Kushner told reporters.
Kushner told reporters how Trump called him early on Thursday morning after hearing “from friends in New York” that Big Apple hospitals were running critically low on supplies, he said.
He called Dr. Mitchell Katz, the president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, who told Kushner he was most nervous about N95 masks which are in critically short supply across the country.
Kushner asked Katz what his “burn rate” was, meaning how many N95 masks the city’s hospitals churned through each day, and he was able to find a months’ supply in the federal inventory, he said.
“The president called Mayor de Blasio and informed him that we were going to send a month of supply to the New York public hospital system to make sure that the workers on the frontline can rest assured that they have the N95 masks that they need to get through the next month,” Kushner said.
“We’ll be doing similar things with all the different public hospitals that are in the hot spot zones and making sure that we’re constantly communications with the local communities,” he added.