Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said the Trump administration sent the wrong form of medical masks in a recent shipment of protective gear to the state.
The White House told Pritzker, a Democrat, that Illinois would receive 300,000 N95 masks from the federal government, he said during a news conference Monday. Instead, the state received surgical masks, which don’t have the same level of protection against respiratory diseases.
“My team is sorting through the shipment of 300,000 N95 masks the White House personally told me would be sent to our state, and while we do not have a final count on this yet, I can say with certainty that what they sent were not the N95 masks that were promised but instead were surgical masks, which is not what we asked for,” Pritzker said.
“I can’t emphasize enough how much we need the federal government to step up and amplify the size of their [personal protective equipment] deliveries to Illinois and, frankly, across the nation,” he said.
Earlier this month, Pritzker warned that states were having to fight each other for supplies to combat the coronavirus and that his state has received only a fraction of the supplies it requested.
“It’s a Wild West out there. And, indeed, we are overpaying, I would say, for [personal protection equipment] because of that competition,” he said.
