Virtual March Calls for Invoking DPA to Supply Masks, Other PPE

More than 1,000 people nationwide logged on last month to a “virtual march” for personal protective equipment (PPE) for the nation’s health care workers who are caring for COVID-19 patients.

The rally was organized by Katherine G. Kennedy, M.D., chair of APA’s Council on Government Relations, and NeedMasksToday, a coalition of resident physicians and other health care professionals at Yale University. Participating in the rally were medical professionals, journalists, legislators, educators, and historians to discuss solutions to the national shortage of masks and other PPE.

Kennedy is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale and co-editor of A Psychiatrist’s Guide to Advocacy from APA Publishing (see here).

“At Yale, I teach physician advocacy to resident physicians from many disciplines—internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry—many of whom are working on the front lines in ERs, ICUs, and hospital floors,” she said in comments to Psychiatric News. “When COVID-19 happened, we refocused on their primary concern—the nationwide PPE shortage and the negative impacts that shortage creates for frontline medical providers, patients, and the general public.”

The rally on Saturday, May 2, was broadcast on CrowdCast, where the event is archived. An unknown number of people also watched the rally on the Facebook page of NeedMasksToday.

The rally specifically focused on a call for the Trump administration to invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) for PPE and pharmaceuticals. In April the administration used the DPA to speed production and delivery of ventilators; at press time other DPA announcements were expected.

Virtual marchers were urged to contact their elected officials and ask them to call on the White House to invoke the DPA for PPE by texting “DPA4PPE” to the text number 52886.

“We are calling for a national solution for the manufacture and equitable distribution of PPE,” Kennedy told Psychiatric News. “The most expedient solution is for the White House to invoke the Defense Production Act for PPE. A federal response would promote American can-do innovation to get us through this crisis and set us on course for long-term solutions.”

She added, “There are PPE shortages and supply chain problems nationwide. My frontline resident physicians and their colleagues around the country are working in systems where they have had to use CDC crisis-capacity strategies—single-use items are reused over and over again—to preserve supplies.”

Kennedy said that local, state, and regional solutions aren’t enough. “This is a global crisis. A national approach just makes sense. So my residents decided to advocate for a national solution.”

Among the speakers at the event were pediatrician Neal Bear, M.D., lecturer in global health and social medicine at Harvard and television writer and producer; U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.); U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-Mass.); Douglas Brinkley, Ph.D., the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and a professor of history at Rice University; Megan Ranney, M.D., an emergency medicine physician and founding director of the Brown Emergency Digital Health Innovation program and an organizer at GetUsPPE.org; and Abbe Gluck, J.D., a professor at Yale Law School and Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

Co-sponsors included GetUsPPE.org and Masks4America.org, national organizations that provide centralized platforms to get PPE materials to frontline health care workers. ■

The rally is archived here.

The NeedMasksToday website here.