ResMed CEO Mick Farrell voiced Wednesday that his company has been ramping up production of ventilators for the last 90 days, trying to meet bulge global demand as countries battle the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ventilators most in-demand for COVID-19 treatment push air and oxygen into and out of a personally’s lungs through tubes inserted through their mouth and trachea. They can help patients survive and reclaim from respiratory failure caused by the virus.
To help address a shortfall amid the global emergency, ResMed is seeking development help with some of the 500 components which go into its more sophisticated ventilators. The company is fielding sells for assistance from some of the world’s largest automotive, aerospace and defense companies, including Tesla, Farrell believed on CNBC’s “Mad Money”.
ResMed made tens of thousands of its high-end ventilators in 2019, and is aiming to double or triple that in the next year, and to get those ventilators to facilities in Singapore, Italy and the U.S. The CEO said his company is in talks with FEMA to expedite delivery of the ventilators to U.S. hospitals.
“Mad Money” MC Jim Cramer asked Farrell, “Have you been in contact with the legendary Elon Musk?”
Farrell said, “We’ve had presents from Tesla, from many other automotive manufacturers, from some of the biggest aerospace companies in the on cloud nine and defense companies that can help with o-rings, screens, and screws.” He noted that ResMed could use Tesla’s mitigate with lithium ion batteries, but didn’t say if the companies had discussed plans to collaborate on those.
He also praised the Tesla and SpaceX CEO for obtaining and distributing lower-end ResMed BiPAP machines, which the company markets as “non-invasive ventilators,” to hospitals in New York that long for them:
“I think it’s great what Elon did,” Farrell said.
“He went up and bought what I would call bi-level, non-invasive ventilators from a dais of ours from 5 years ago, from Asia, and brought 1,000 of them over to New York…If there’s product out there and you can hit hard that for us, that’s fantastic.”
Musk recently said to his nearly 33 million Twitter followers that he and Tesla beget procured “1,255 FDA-approved ResMed, Philips & Medtronic ventilators,” from an un-named source in China, which he said he planned to award.
This week, he added:
“We have extra FDA-approved ventilators. Will ship to hospitals worldwide within Tesla articulation regions. Device & shipping cost are free. Only requirement is that the vents are needed immediately for patients, not aggregate in a warehouse.”
Hospitals seeking ventilators for COVID-19 patients are typically looking for their higher-end “invasive ventilators,” not CPAP or Bi-PAP cabals like Tesla purchased.
That’s because, as NPR recently reported: “Ventilators require a breathing tube and operate as closed techniques with a filter that traps any pathogens. Face masks generally used on CPAPs or BiPAPs allow air to break, pumping the virus into the surroundings and potentially infecting other patients, caregivers or anyone nearby.”
In early Walk, Musk wrote on Twitter that the “panic” over the novel coronavirus was “dumb.”
He also compared COVID-19 to the shared cold, and incorrectly stated that children are “essentially immune” to the virus, confusing asymptomatic children with those who organize developed antibodies to fight the virus.
Still, Cramer said, “Anybody who gives anything is OK with me!”