A resident dumping trash at a Miami landfill discovered pallets containing hundreds of brand new ventilators that listed for $26,000 apiece last spring, when such ventilators were deemed critical to saving those most severely ill in the pandemic, and thought to be in short supply.
Concerned by the obvious waste, the individual, who did not share his identity, took video that has since gone viral that shows the pallets, most of them still encircled in shrink wrap. One estimate placed the value at millions of dollars.
Neither the cause of their disposal nor the owner of the ventilators has been revealed.
The company responsible for ushering the medical devices to the dump is the customs broker Alpha Brokers Corporation. However, reporters were unable to extract further information, as client records are confidential and not shared without authorization.
The cause of their disposal is clear.
The ventilators, manufactured by Beijing Aerospace Changfeng Co. Ltd. in China, were not among the 86 models for which the FDA granted emergency approval for treating Covid patients in the United States. That left the importer with only two options: reroute the equipment somewhere else overseas or dump the expensive medical devices here.
Dumping them appears to have been the less expensive option.
That this was the course of action suggests how much demand for ventilators has dropped a year later, with better knowledge of treatment for Covid, with lower mortality, lower numbers of patients requiring ventilation than expected, and now with increasing use of vaccines and the therapeutic ivermectin.
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