Despite Johnson’s call to arms on making ventilators, only a single machine ever saw use
AS the coronavirus pandemic spread unchecked in Britain in March, Boris Johnson issued a panicky “call to arms” to 100 of the country’s top industrialists. The UK prime minister said he needed tens of thousands of ventilators immediately, to save Britain’s intensive care units from being overwhelmed by patients unable to breathe.
And in a remarkable, almost Hollywood-ready story, a consortium of old-school British companies — which normally make things like passenger-jet wings and Formula 1 racing cars — responded, teaming up with a couple of small-time medical-device companies to pull off the near-impossible.
By July, the production teams in the UK Ventilator Challenge had delivered 13,437 of the potentially lifesaving machines to the National Health Service — more than doubling the state-supported care provider’s stock. The turnaround was head-spinning, especially by English manufacturing standards.
Assembly lines that had been producing 10 or 20 ventilators a week in small, bespoke workshops in the countryside were soon cranking out more than 400 a day, with help from Ford, Airbus, McLaren,
Rolls-Royce, GKN Aerospace and other giants, scaling up to a 24/7 operation employing more than 3,500 frontline technicians at seven plants.
The effort by participants was inspiring. But its practical impact was far less so.
In keeping with the British government’s overall response to the virus, there was a heroic dash that delivered results late.
The bulk of ventilators made by the consortium arrived months after the outbreak’s peak in April. Of the 11,683 machines manufactured by Penlon, the main British provider, only one was used on patients, as part of its approval process.
But the initiative had a second track that also gripped the popular imagination — a call for British inventors to design and build from scratch entirely novel ventilation devices that could pass safety and efficacy tests and be manufactured in weeks. That effort ended in a bit of a fog.
Thousands of inventors — including at least one household name, vacuum-cleaner manufacturer James Dyson — answered the government’s call and downloaded the specifications. Hundreds submitted preliminary designs.
But in the end, only a handful of novel breathing machines met the performance requirements. None were certified for sale by Britain’s regulatory authorities, and the government’s pre-orders were cancelled. None made it to the NHS.
But it’s not an utterly futile exercise. The devices may ultimately prove to be lifesaving if Britain is overwhelmed by a large second wave of infection in winter.
The 13,437 emergency ventilators ultimately produced by Penlon and Smiths Medical are ready on standby — just as the UK’s temporary ‘Nightingale’ hospitals, built in mere weeks in conference centres, await patients if a second wave hits.