The United States announced on Friday that it will sell artificial respirators to at least four developing countries to fight the coronavirus. Donald Trump said he spoke on the phone with his counterparts in Indonesia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras, promising to provide them with this critical medical equipment for Covid-19 patients.
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"We are going to send them the respirators they desperately need, we recently produced them in large numbers, and we will help them in many other ways," the American president said on Twitter after his conversation with Ecuadorian President Lenin. Moreno, whose country is the second most hit in Latin America by the pandemic.
The Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, Michael Kozak, has confirmed that Washington will sell these respirators. "We have managed to meet our own needs, we can start exporting again," he told reporters.
“In many cases, these countries simply want to buy them. They are not asking us to pay them for them, " he said, adding that some of them could use American aid to finance these imports.