The inside story of the Ventilator Challenge

A thread written by @pmdfoster: "NEW: The inside story of the Ventilator Challenge - the muddled thinking, the wasted time the political egoism...

around March 13... Panic is on in UK to DO SOMETHING ... UK doesn't have much advanced manufacturing capacity... start on March 14 by summoning the 'Blitz spirit' ... urging UK manufacturers to ... make ventilators... lots of wartime blah... WHAT should those manufacturers build? ...

March 16 ... top industrial bosses... want something simple... it is SO simple ... people who understood both ventilators AND manufacturing were raising serious misgivings... MakeUK... told Today we'd be better making existing stuff under license. @PenlonGlobal... says it is "unrealistic" to make from scratch... still, that's what the govt chooses to do ... a 'hackathon' to reinvent the complex wheel that is a medical ventilator...

does not contain really important features including “spontaneous breathing modes” ... government insists ... all done with the advice of both top doctors AND the regulators... quite quickly there was push-back about the utility of these basic vents... "that's what the customer wants".... WHO was the customer?... The politicians...

by April 10... 'amended' spec ... greater proportion ... need ... “spontaneous breathing modes”... the Bluesky consortium - which HAD BUILT to spec is canned on April 11... another low-spec effort is paused ... quite possibly none of these 'hackathon' designs will get approval ...

deeply worrying tendency ... politicians to think they know best... leads to headless decision making... Expert people TEARING their hair out at the willful numbskullery of the people at the top...

a device that ... breathes for you IS flipping complicated. How hard can it be? Damn hard.