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Since the debut of Project Airbridge in March, the Trump administration has promoted the initiative as part of a historic mobilization “moving heaven and earth” to source and deliver vast amounts of medical supplies from overseas to pandemic hot spots in the United States. Widely credited to President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, the plan harked back to storied U.S. wartime efforts such as the Berlin Airlift. It called for the federal government to partner with a handful of medical supply companies, which could purchase emergency masks, gowns and gloves in Asia. The government would pay to fly the supplies to the United States — bypassing weeks of shipping delays — as long as the companies sold half of the goods in parts of the country hit hardest by the pandemic. (Brittain, Stanley-Becker and Miroff, 5/8)

As requests for ventilators from the national stockpile reached a crescendo in late March, President Donald Trump made what seemed like a bold claim: His administration would have 100,000 within 100 days. At the time, the Department of Health and Human Services had not ordered any new ventilators since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in January. But records show that over the following three weeks, the agency scrambled to turn Trump’s pledge into a reality, spending nearly $3 billion to spur U.S. manufacturers to crank out the breathing machines at an unprecedented pace. (Biesecker and Krisher, 5/10)

It was Jan. 22, a day after the first case of covid-19 was detected in the United States, and orders were pouring into Michael Bowen’s company outside Fort Worth, some from as far away as Hong Kong. Bowen’s medical supply company, Prestige Ameritech, could ramp up production to make an additional 1.7 million N95 masks a week. He viewed the shrinking domestic production of medical masks as a national security issue, though, and he wanted to give the federal government first dibs. (Davis, 5/9)

U.S. companies continued their massive sell-off of medical masks overseas throughout March, well after the coronavirus began infecting Americans and draining hospitals of critical supplies and even as White House officials raised red flags, a USA TODAY investigation found. America exported more protective masks — including disposable surgical masks and N95 respirator masks — this March than in any other month in the past decade. In all, $83.1 million worth were sent from the United States to the rest of the world, according to an analysis of the latest U.S. Census Bureau trade data. (Zhang, Wedell and Mansfield, 5/8)

South Korea's foreign ministry said Sunday that it had donated two million medical face masks to the U.S. to help fill shortages in hospitals hit hardest by the coronavirus. A press release from the agency obtained by Yonhap News Agency confirmed that a cargo plane carrying the masks would arrive in the U.S. on Monday. (Bowden, 5/10)