Some of France’s largest companies have joined forces to try to produce 10,000 ventilators in 50 days as President Emmanuel Macron promises to ramp up the production of critical medical equipment to treat coronavirus, reports the Financial Times.
The initiative comes amid a global rush to provide life-saving machines, overwhelming established medical device makers with orders, often at multiples of their normal output.
Mr Macron announced the plan on Tuesday during a visit to a medical-mask factory in the west of the country, where he also said the country was on course to increase the production of masks to 15m a week by the end of April.
“The days to come will not look like the days that have gone before. We must rebuild our national and European sovereignty,” he said. As part of that push, a consortium led by industrial gas specialist Air Liquide, which is also the only French producer of ventilators, is to “study the possibility” of providing 10,000 respirators by mid-May.
France’s attempts to produce more of the life-saving devices follows other nations that have urged domestic industry to rise to the challenge of plugging the shortage.