(Eagle News) – “United we stand, divided we fall.”
Noted Chinese billionaire and business magnate Jack Ma said this in a statement on Friday, March 13, as he offered to give half a million testing kits and a million face masks to the United States.
This was after the US — where confirmed coronavirus cases hit more than 1,200 and 33 deaths due to the virus — reported a severe shortage of testing kits because of a lack of reagents as reported by the US Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention.
The founder of the Alibaba and Jack Ma Foundation, Ma said that he hoped his donation could help the American people.
“Through a donation of 500,000 testing kits and 1 million masks, we join hands with Americans in these difficult times,” he said in a tweet.
“Over the past few weeks, Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Foundation collaborated to source much-needed materials to combat COVID-19 to afflicted areas in Japan, Korea, Italy, Iran and Spain.”
“Now we have sourced and readied for shipment 500,000 testing kits and 1 million masks to be donated to the United States,” he said.
“Drawing from my own country’s experience, speedy and accurate testing and adequate personal protective equipment for medical professionals are most effective in preventing the spread of the virus.”
Ma said that he hopes that the donation can help Americans fight the pandemic, as he observed that the coronavirus crisis presented “a huge challenge in a globalized world.”
“We hope that our donation can help Americans fight the pandemic,” he said.
-Jack Ma: “We need to combat the virus by working hand-in-hand”
“The pandemic we face today can no longer be resolved by any individual country. Rather, we need to combat the virus by working hand-in-hand,” he said.
“At this moment, we can’t beat this virus unless we eliminate boundaries to resources and share our know-how and hard-earned lessons,” said Ma who started his first company in 1994, and then built his career after realizing the power of the internet.
On Thursday, March 12, testifying before US Congress, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield said that the more than a million test kits promised earlier by US Vice President Mike Pence as close to being deployed were not operational.
This was reportedly because there was a shortage of re-agents, the activating substances. He said that they also required more nasal swabs and trained staff so that more Americans could be tested.
Early this week, US Vice President Mike Pence said that through a combination of government and private efforts a million test kits had now been deployed and millions more were on the way — figures that were later revealed to be misleading because these kits still lack vital components to activate them.
“The system is not really geared to what we need right now,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in his congressional testimony Thursday.
(with a report from Agence France Presse)