WASHINGTON — President Trump lashed out at General Motors on Friday, blaming it for overpromising on its ability to make new ventilators for critically ill coronavirus patients and threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act to compel the company to do so.
In a series of tweets, the president emphasized the urgent need for the ventilators, an abrupt change of tone from the night before, when he told Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, that states were inflating their needs.
Mr. Trump appeared to be reacting to reports that the White House had dragged its feet in awarding contracts to G.M. and Ventec Life Systems, to start new production lines in a converted G.M. plant in Kokomo, Ind.
With the Federal Emergency Management Agency still evaluating a $1.5 billion proposal from those companies, Mr. Trump declared that General Motors “MUST immediately open their stupidly abandoned Lordstown plant in Ohio, or some other plant, and START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!!!!!!”
He added, “FORD, GET GOING ON ventilators, FAST!!!!!!”
Within an hour, General Motors and Ventec announced that they would begin producing ventilators at the Kokomo plant, and that the machines would be “scheduled to ship as soon as next month.”
But the statement offered no estimates of numbers and did not address the president’s criticism — leaving it unclear if the companies would simply begin production themselves, or whether the Trump administration would be buying and distributing the machines.
The competing tweets and announcements underscored the chaos that has surrounded the effort to ramp up emergency production.
Both the president and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the top health expert on his coronavirus task force, have played down the immediate need for a large number of ventilators in New York and other states, rejecting calls from governors and major hospitals to help them before their needs outstrip their supply.
“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” Mr. Trump said, discussing an urgent request from Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York. “You know, you’re going to major hospitals sometimes, they’ll have two ventilators. And now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, can we order 30,000 ventilators?”
In a news briefing on Thursday, Dr. Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, also said the talk of a ventilator shortage was overwrought.
“We were reassured after meeting with colleagues in New York there are still beds remaining and over 2,000 ventilators that have not been used yet,” Dr. Birx said. “To say that to the American people, to make the implication when they need a hospital bed, it won’t be there, or when they need that ventilator, it won’t be there, we don’t have evidence of that right now.”
But New York officials said they expected a shortage reaching in the thousands in the coming weeks, as the number of cases continues to grow. “Our single greatest challenge is ventilators,” Mr. Cuomo wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. “We need 30,000 ventilators. We have 11,000.”
On Friday morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York hit back at the administration for questioning the request. “When the president says the state of New York doesn’t need 30,000 ventilators, with all due respect to him, he’s not looking at the facts of this astronomical growth of this crisis,” Mr. de Blasio said in an interview with “Good Morning America.”
A ventilator, Mr. de Blasio added, “means someone lives or dies.”
The White House had been preparing to unveil the G.M.-Ventec joint venture this week, and had hoped to announce that upward of 20,000 ventilators would be available in weeks, and ultimately 80,000 would be produced, which is more than the current global annual production of high-end ventilators.
But it canceled the announcement, government officials said, because they needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost — more than $1 billion — was prohibitive, and whether G.M. could produce at those levels. In fact, G.M. scaled back the estimate of the number of ventilators it could produce in coming months in Kokomo, saying the initial output would be closer to 5,000 to 7,500.
Mr. Trump angrily accused the company of backtracking and as “As usual with ‘this’ General Motors, things just never seem to work out.” He claimed the company had promised 40,000 ventilators, and “now they are saying it will only be 6,000, in late April, and they want top dollar. Always a mess with Mary B.,’’ a reference to G.M.’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra.
But G.M. says it has been preparing the Kokomo plant while pressing the administration to issue a contract and provide it with about $250 million to buy parts and convert the plant, which ordinarily makes transmissions and other car components, for the delicate work of making machines that can pump air into the lungs of patients.
Ventilators are complex machines, using more than 1,500 unique parts from more than a dozen nations, and the manufacturers say they will be limited in part by the availability of parts.
Critics of the administration note that the planning for increased production should have begun in late January or February, when the alarm sounded that the virus was headed to the United States, and that any production that begins will not be available until May or June.