China Controls Your Meds

Chris

Administrator
Staff member
China Controls Your Meds
Beijing’s chokehold on our medication supply chain.
By Betsy McCaughey

Democrats and Republicans battered TikTok’s CEO at a House of Representatives hearing on Thursday — for good reason. The Chinese app poses a national security risk, accumulating troves of data on its American users. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s slithery comment that “I don’t think spying is the right way to describe it,” only heightened concerns.

Too bad another Chinese threat — bigger and more immediate — isn’t getting the same attention. China has a chokehold on our medication supply chain. Beijing controls many — in some cases, all — active ingredients for the remedies in our medicine chests, the drugs used in emergency rooms and even antibiotics administered to soldiers on the battlefield.

The med bottles in your cabinet don’t say “Made in China,” but nearly all are, including 97% of U.S. antibiotics, by some estimates.

In a tense situation, Beijing could simply cut off shipments of antibiotics, cancer drugs and other meds, forcing the U.S. to cede to its demands. Our survival hinges on their goodwill. Terrifying.

China cornered the market for drug ingredients fast. Until the mid-1990s, the West and Japan produced 90% of the world’s active pharmaceutical ingredients. By 2017, China was producing 40%. Now almost all drug pipelines start in China. Even India, the other drug producing giant, relies on China for 70% of its active pharmaceutical ingredients.

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Gary Peters warns that foreign dependence is “an unacceptable national security risk.” But talk is cheap.

As China’s grip tightens, the federal government is doing next to nothing, according to the Committee’s report released last week.

In 2019, Congress requested the Food and Drug Administration list the lifesaving drugs Americans rely on and which countries supply them. The FDA still hasn’t done it. FDA bureaucrats pathetically plead, in so many words, that it’s too much work to pore over the applicants filed by drug producers for the information.

It gets worse. In 2021, the Department of Defense inspector general issued a scathing report that DOD lacked strategies to circumvent reliance on foreign drug suppliers. Yet as of last week, DOD still hadn’t assembled data on where its drugs originate or what can be done to overcome chokeholds.

President Joe Biden’s Defense Department considers securing medicines for the military a lower priority than woke goals such as pronoun lessons, sex change surgery for transgender personnel and climate change.

Biden himself told Air Force personnel that global warming was the greatest threat facing America. Biden proposes spending “billions” converting every military vehicle to electric, but only $60 million — a tiny fraction of that sum — to incentivize domestic manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. That says it all.

Sorry, Mr. President, but China should not control access to medicines for our soldiers and citizens.

Even in peacetime, America’s dependence on far-away drug suppliers is a problem. Parents are frantically racing from one drug store to the next for amoxicillin for their child’s strep throat and meds for ADHD.

Reliance on China also means accepting drugs made in squalid factories that are seldom, or never, inspected by the FDA, according to a General Accountability Office report. In 2008, a contaminated blood thinner from China, heparin, killed 81 American patients.

It’s time to bring drug manufacturing home. One obvious way is to restore Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, which Congress enacted in 1976 to attract industry to Puerto Rico. It gave companies a tax credit equal to what they would have to pay the federal government on their earnings there. Pharmaceutical plants sprang up fast there, and by 1990, 17 of the 21 most prescribed drugs in the U.S. were made in Puerto Rico. When Congress ended the subsidy, drug manufacturing moved halfway around the world to China, but some factories still sit idle.

In ordinary times, Democrats would reject tax breaks for drug companies. But even oncologist Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a Democrat and former Obama health adviser, has recommended this quick solution to a menacing situation.

For all the money Americans spend on medications, there’s no reason to settle for cheap, sometimes contaminated Chinese ingredients and the looming threat of a Chinese blockade. Tell Congress to act.

https://www.raptureforums.com/politics-culture-wars/china-controls-your-meds/
 

lightofmylife

Blessed Hope-Prepare To Fly!
Until recent years I was unaware of how much we relied on China for meds.
Why is it problematic to manufacture in the US? Tax codes? I thought Big Pharma made gazillions of $$$???

I do know that a lot of sterile medical supplies are made in China. I have always been against that.
This isn't good to rely :runaway on them, and can't say that my trust :reaction level is high. We should not have to depend on them we should have our own provisions in America.
 

SJ129

Well-Known Member
Honestly, I don’t know that I’d trust American manufacturers any more than I would China. Look at Pfizer, they have had some of the largest criminal settlements in history (over false claims of their drugs). Healthcare as a whole is generally corrupt. I’d personally like to learn some herbal medicine and natural healing techniques. God gave us wonderful plants that can be used for a host of ailments! Got a toothache- clove oil. Headache? Peppermint. Etc etc. I realize that this is over simplified, I’m obviously not a surgeon, but we need to learn more self sufficiency in this area (as well as food) by using what the creator gave us for good.
 

lightofmylife

Blessed Hope-Prepare To Fly!
Honestly, I don’t know that I’d trust American manufacturers any more than I would China. Look at Pfizer, they have had some of the largest criminal settlements in history (over false claims of their drugs). Healthcare as a whole is generally corrupt. I’d personally like to learn some herbal medicine and natural healing techniques. God gave us wonderful plants that can be used for a host of ailments! Got a toothache- clove oil. Headache? Peppermint. Etc etc. I realize that this is over simplified, I’m obviously not a surgeon, but we need to learn more self sufficiency in this area (as well as food) by using what the creator gave us for good.
I agree! :bighug In God We Trust! People will let us down, but God is a :thumbup:thumbup friend that sticks closer than a brother. :amen
 

Wally

Choose Your Words Carefully...
Having a couple drug factories nearby, I suspect the China choke hold may not be the drugs themselves, but all the base materials we make the drugs from.

Of course with so many medical plans dedicated to cost savings, no wonder China has become the primary source.

When it comes to $$$ we can be our own worst enemy. But so long as Wall Street stays healthy... :nope
 

NewWine2020

Well-Known Member
China Controls Your Meds
Beijing’s chokehold on our medication supply chain.
By Betsy McCaughey

Democrats and Republicans battered TikTok’s CEO at a House of Representatives hearing on Thursday — for good reason. The Chinese app poses a national security risk, accumulating troves of data on its American users. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s slithery comment that “I don’t think spying is the right way to describe it,” only heightened concerns.

Too bad another Chinese threat — bigger and more immediate — isn’t getting the same attention. China has a chokehold on our medication supply chain. Beijing controls many — in some cases, all — active ingredients for the remedies in our medicine chests, the drugs used in emergency rooms and even antibiotics administered to soldiers on the battlefield.

The med bottles in your cabinet don’t say “Made in China,” but nearly all are, including 97% of U.S. antibiotics, by some estimates.

In a tense situation, Beijing could simply cut off shipments of antibiotics, cancer drugs and other meds, forcing the U.S. to cede to its demands. Our survival hinges on their goodwill. Terrifying.

China cornered the market for drug ingredients fast. Until the mid-1990s, the West and Japan produced 90% of the world’s active pharmaceutical ingredients. By 2017, China was producing 40%. Now almost all drug pipelines start in China. Even India, the other drug producing giant, relies on China for 70% of its active pharmaceutical ingredients.

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Gary Peters warns that foreign dependence is “an unacceptable national security risk.” But talk is cheap.

As China’s grip tightens, the federal government is doing next to nothing, according to the Committee’s report released last week.

In 2019, Congress requested the Food and Drug Administration list the lifesaving drugs Americans rely on and which countries supply them. The FDA still hasn’t done it. FDA bureaucrats pathetically plead, in so many words, that it’s too much work to pore over the applicants filed by drug producers for the information.

It gets worse. In 2021, the Department of Defense inspector general issued a scathing report that DOD lacked strategies to circumvent reliance on foreign drug suppliers. Yet as of last week, DOD still hadn’t assembled data on where its drugs originate or what can be done to overcome chokeholds.

President Joe Biden’s Defense Department considers securing medicines for the military a lower priority than woke goals such as pronoun lessons, sex change surgery for transgender personnel and climate change.

Biden himself told Air Force personnel that global warming was the greatest threat facing America. Biden proposes spending “billions” converting every military vehicle to electric, but only $60 million — a tiny fraction of that sum — to incentivize domestic manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. That says it all.

Sorry, Mr. President, but China should not control access to medicines for our soldiers and citizens.

Even in peacetime, America’s dependence on far-away drug suppliers is a problem. Parents are frantically racing from one drug store to the next for amoxicillin for their child’s strep throat and meds for ADHD.

Reliance on China also means accepting drugs made in squalid factories that are seldom, or never, inspected by the FDA, according to a General Accountability Office report. In 2008, a contaminated blood thinner from China, heparin, killed 81 American patients.

It’s time to bring drug manufacturing home. One obvious way is to restore Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, which Congress enacted in 1976 to attract industry to Puerto Rico. It gave companies a tax credit equal to what they would have to pay the federal government on their earnings there. Pharmaceutical plants sprang up fast there, and by 1990, 17 of the 21 most prescribed drugs in the U.S. were made in Puerto Rico. When Congress ended the subsidy, drug manufacturing moved halfway around the world to China, but some factories still sit idle.

In ordinary times, Democrats would reject tax breaks for drug companies. But even oncologist Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a Democrat and former Obama health adviser, has recommended this quick solution to a menacing situation.

For all the money Americans spend on medications, there’s no reason to settle for cheap, sometimes contaminated Chinese ingredients and the looming threat of a Chinese blockade. Tell Congress to act.

https://www.raptureforums.com/politics-culture-wars/china-controls-your-meds/
This is a total failure on the part of greedy mega corps; I'm not a socialist but I do think companies should care about factors other than JUST making max profits.

Of course how many of these meds are actually merited and how many are the result of drs acting as legalized drug pushers for big pharma?

The fact that so many Americans are on meds at all is an indication that our culture and society are fundamentally broken.
 

Wally

Choose Your Words Carefully...
And how much of the drug need is manufactured?

Even the plethora of illegal drugs creates a need for "treatment". Makes one wonder if someone is helping the street drugs get to the public.
 

madcat

Well-Known Member
This is a subject I can speak to (unfortunately). Combined pharmacy experience for my husband, brother, SIL, and niece is over 150 yrs. Back in the 70’s, basic meds were usually available, and most were researched and patented in the US. There were some really bad products that got approved and cost lives anyway, like Thalidomide. There is a list on Wikipedia under “list of withdrawn drugs “ that is a mile long. PROPER clinical trials are a farce these days, as $$$ is the driving force to get drugs on the market.
By the late 80’s the shift to outsource drug components to China was booming. While a drug (like chemo) may be researched and patented by a U.S. co. (Merck, Eli Lily, Pfizer, etc.), it is very profitable to give China the “recipes“ and have them manufacture the components, and most of the the time assemble the drugs, too. India still manufactures Ivermectin because all,of their population takes it for malaria prevention, but with other drugs, they will also get the individual chemical components from China.
So basically, 80-90% of the world’s drug components are coming from Chinese labs, with PATHETIC over site regarding sterile process, precision as to the content of the components, etc.
I can assure you if you look on the back of any OTC drug you buy at a drugstore, you see “distributed by”, but not “manufactured by”. They don’t even manufacture their own packaging.
It’s buyer-beware from here on out, as the drug companies will never give up the huge profits they make by outsourcing.
As for drug shortages, on any given day at my DH’s hospital, they can have a list of several hundred drugs either unavailable or in very short supply. Sometimes hospitals can “trade” with each other to cover the shortages, but that’s in larger cities/suburbs that have maybe 10+ hospitals. The big problems come when it’s things like drugs used in anesthesia, chemo drugs, stat drugs for pain in ER’s, as well as things like syringes, needles, tubing for IV’s, and other critical supplies that are also manufactured in China.
Bad news is the Big Pharma cos. have no incentive to bring back production to the US, and China “owns” most of them in many ways.
Just look at the BILLIONS Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca, etc. made on COVID (and still are).
Quite frankly, if the US stopped doing business with China, every hospital in this country would close their doors within a week.

I agree that alternatives and God-given organic substances need to be explored where possible, and in today’s world, it is imperative to have a “medical bugout bag” in your house, just in case.
 

Tall Timbers

Imperfect but forgiven
The US became increasingly non-competitive on a global scale due to corporate tax structure and bureaucracy. Until Trump lowered the corporate tax rate, the corporate tax in the US was nearly double that of the countries corporations were moving to. As with just about every other problem the US currently faces, it originated with our govmint.
 
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