As the coronavirus crisis tore through the country last month, Illinois Comptroller Susan Mendoza knew she had to act quickly to clinch a deal for 1.5 million masks from China to protect healthcare workers on the front lines of the pandemic.
The vendor needed a $3 million check within hours and Mendoza was worried she might lose out to a Russian competitor who had offered cash for the masks.
So Mendoza’s aide, Ellen Andres, jumped in her car and sped down the expressway to meet the vendor in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Dwight, Ill. – 126 miles from Springfield, the state capital. After scanning the make and model of the vehicles, Andres found her contact and handed over the check.
"You feel like you have a gun up against your head and if you don't get it done, you're going to lose one and a half million masks," Mendoza recalled. "You feel like you're doing some kind of sketchy drug deal but you're really working hard to try to save people's lives."
The transaction underscores the challenges states have been facing to obtain masks, gloves and other protective gear for healthcare workers as they also try to get their hands on ventilators and test kits. The process has led to tensions between President Donald Trump and governors such as Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York who have been urging the federal government to take the lead role in ordering equipment, a request Trump has rejected.
"Who would have ever thought that the state government, in order to acquire something that keeps people alive, somebody would have to speed down a highway and meet somebody at a McDonald's?" Pritzker said in an interview with USA TODAY.
"We not only have to outbid other states and other folks who are trying to acquire personal protective equipment by price, but we also have to move more quickly. It's about speed and price," Pritzker said.
More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.
A number of CDC staffers are regularly detailed to work at WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.
The presence of so many U.S. officials undercuts President Trump’s charge that the WHO’s failure to communicate the extent of the threat, born of a desire to protect China, is largely responsible for the rapid spread of the virus in the United States.
