As America struggles to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, one has to wonder how we allowed ourselves to become so dependent on China for critically important pharmaceutics. This didn’t happen overnight. For more than two decades America has been off-shoring our pharmaceutical manufacturing capabilities. This is a serious national security problem.
A Good War highly recommends you read Rosemary Gibson’s article.
“America’s dependence on China for antibiotics and other medicines has been steadily rising. If China shuts the door on exports, military and civilian hospitals would cease to function within months.”
“This dependence became evident when the FDA inspected a factory in China in 2015 that made multiple key ingredients for prescription drugs. Sixty-one complaints from commercial customers reported products lacked full-potency and contained impurities. FDA inspectors spent a week at the plant and ended up banning 29 products from the U.S. for serious breaches of standards. But because the FDA was so concerned about shortages of antibiotics and chemotherapies for cancer treatment, it exempted 14 products from its own ban.”
Rosemary Gibson is the author of China RX.