Ben Smilowitz, Executive Director, Disaster Accountability Project, discusses the need to use the DPA to create billions of vaccines.
Ben Smilowitz has important advice
Ben Smilowitz spent time discussing a reality that should not be. He recently wrote an article in The Hill that reads,
Now that a COVID-19 vaccine has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the White House should immediately leverage the Defense Production Act to ramp up production to save as many lives as possible and allow our economy to recover. Any delay in expanding productive capacity will unnecessarily extend this deadly pandemic and cause further harm to our economy.
The same White House that invoked the Defense Production Act as many as 300,000 times in the last year alone, mostly to prioritize defense contracts unrelated to COVID-19, surely knows how to use the law to secure vaccine doses for everyone in our country.
When it comes to using the Defense Production Act, the White House has a big “magic wand” and could use the law to produce a billion doses.
Instead of focusing on only the prioritization of available vaccine supply, the White House should focus on expanding productive capacity utilizing Title 3 of the Defense Production Act.
The big question is, will they?
Ben expands on that article in detail. Listen to the entire interview. It is enlightening.