April 21, 2020

Nurses Don’t Have Proper Protection to Fight the Coronavirus. They’re Begging Trump to Help.

A dozen nurses, standing six feet apart outside the White House on Tuesday, called on the Trump administration and Congress to allocate proper personal protective equipment for health care workers who desperately need them.

The nurses, represented by the National Nurses United, demanded that Trump invoke the Defense Production Act to require the private sector to manufacture PPE, which is in such low supply across the country that many health care workers have had to reuse equipment or simply improvise their own.

“Nurses are raising our voices across the country, and we demand to be heard,” one nurse said. “President Trump, Congress, and all other government officials: We demand that you immediately give PPE to nurses, doctors, and health care workers on the front lines of this pandemic. If you don’t protect us, we can’t protect our patients.”

Another nurse read the names of 50 nurses who have died from COVID-19.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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