Arnold Schwarzenegger donates $1M in masks, gear to hospital workers fighting coronavirus

Action movie icon and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has donated $1 million in personal protection equipment to hospitals dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak.

“Mission accomplished,” he said in a video he shared on Facebook, in which he said he went down to make sure the shipment had arrived, cheekily tearing open a box and verifying that there were N95 masks inside.

The former governor has kept a public profile as the coronavirus crisis wracks health care workers across the country and has resulted in stay-at-home orders and other restrictions for many Americans. He’s been urging people to socially isolate in a number of videos and social media posts -- some of which show backyard workout tips.

And he called subsequent state leaders “shortsighted” for a move to strip funding from a pandemic response program he established while serving as governor in 2006, according to Politico.

The remark came in response to an investigative report that revealed former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown defunded Schwarzenegger’s mobile hospital response program in 2011. The move was meant to help stabilize the $26 billion deficit Brown inherited coming into office following the Great Recession, according to Reveal and the Los Angeles Times.

Schwarzenegger declined to go on the offensive in a follow-up Facebook post.

“I’m not interested in fighting yesterday’s battles,” he wrote. “I’m focused on tomorrow’s battle. We have to learn from this crisis to prioritize preparedness going forward.”

 

 

 

 

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Stay at home, stay fit. We cannot control the virus but we can control our fitness.

A post shared by Arnold Schwarzenegger (@schwarzenegger) on Mar 31, 2020 at 3:33pm PDT

He’s also willing to spend his own money to help out. Last Tuesday, he said he had donated the $1 million to a GoFundMe set up for hospital workers in a post on Instagram.

“This is a simple way to protect our real action heroes on the frontlines in our hospitals, and I’m proud to be part of it,” he wrote. “I never believed in sitting on the couch and complaining about how bad things are.”