When Covid-19’s first surge hit Boston in 2020, biomedical engineer Scot Mackeil knew every single ventilator mattered. Recruited by a local hospital to vet ventilators from a federal stockpile, he examined hundreds of the life-sustaining machines. When he came across one ventilator with a crushed power cord, he thought it’d be an easy fix — he’d simply ring up its manufacturer to ask for a replacement cord.
“I never imagined that I would get the reaction that I got,” said Mackeil, a senior biomedical engineering technologist based in Quincy, Massachusetts. “‘Oh, absolutely no, we cannot send you a power plug,’” he recalled them telling him. “‘You’re not qualified to work on our pressure-driven transport ventilator. You haven’t attended our service school.’”