New York: US President Donald Trump has invoked special defence powers to force auto giant General Motors to make ventilators urgently needed to treat coronavirus patients after the company had backtracked on earlier promises and haggled over prices.
Announcing on Friday that he was using the Defence Production Act (DPA) against GM, Trump said: "We thought we had a deal for 40,000 ventilators and, all of a sudden, the 40,000 came down to 6,000.
And then they talked about a higher price than we were discussing, so I didn't like it." The availability of ventilators has become the touchstone of the nation's preparedness to meet the pandemic as the US became the country with the most cases, recording 104,463 confirmed cases by Friday night,