“We are at war with coronavirus, and we need a massive wartime manufacturing mobilization,” the senator said. “Make no mistake, we are facing an equally deadly enemy in this virus, an invisible enemy we need to bring all of our authority and resources to bear in order to defeat.”

In a Boston press conference, Markey urged the Trump Administration to use the Defense Production Act, a law passed at the start of the Korean War in 1950, to mobilize private industry for defense production. Markey called for exponential increases in production of testing kits and protective gear like respirator masks for health care workers.

Senator Edward J. Markey called Sunday for a wartime-like mobilization of private manufacturing to supply hospitals with the tests and protective equipment they need to handle the novel coronavirus.


As of Saturday afternoon, there were 138 cases of the virus reported in Massachusetts, 104 of them related to a conference biotech company Biogen held in February.

Markey cited an estimate from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that health care workers nationwide could need up to 3.5 billion respirator masks to protect themselves as they evaluate and treat patients -- but the Strategic National Stockpile has only about 12 million masks.

Markey lauded federal emergency clearance for Waltham-based Thermo Fisher Scientific to produce up to 5 million tests for the virus as a positive step, but said more work is necessary.

“We need to dramatically scale up testing and ensure our continued ability to test," Markey said. “Our nation must be able to conduct tens, or hundreds, or thousands of tests daily, ultimately testing millions of people, tens of millions of people, across the course of this response.”

Markey on Sunday did not name any colleagues in Congress who said they would support the act, but said he would call on them to back him.


The Defense Production Act has been used only a few times since its passing 70 years ago.

The act allows the federal government to “demand that manufacturers give priority to defense production, to requisition materials and property, to expand government and private defense production capacity, ration consumer goods, fix wage and price ceilings, force settlement of some labor disputes, control consumer credit and regulate real estate construction credit and loans, provide certain antitrust protections to industry, and establish a voluntary reserve of private sector executives who would be available for emergency federal employment,” according to a 2018 report.

The Trump administration invoked the law in 2017 to “to rectify a shortfall in the space industrial base.”

“We need a coordinated national plan to produce the bedding, produce the equipment, produce all of the articles that are going to be necessary in order to deal with this inundation of our medical system, which is on its way,” Markey said Sunday. “We’re looking at, Italy, we’re looking at France, we’re looking at Spain. it’s moving inexorably in our direction, and we have a brief period of time to get prepared. But if we don’t invoke all of the executive powers, all of the legislative powers which we have, then unfortunately we will not put in place all of the protections which we need.”