Posted on 03/30/2023 6:26:05 AM PDT by Heartlander
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.
Just another example of the Neocons not looking at the implications of starting wars. In this case, we can kiss goodbye our pharmaceutical supply.
I do not think this is hyperbole: if we end up in a war with China, drug shipments from China will end. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will die because their life maintaining medicines are not available. It is not just medicine. Lots of everyday medical supplies are made in China, and not in the United States. The next time you go to the doctor’s office for a visit and you are waiting, just checkout what’s laying around and see where it’s made.
Most people would be better off without them anyway.
My suspicion is most of the drugs these days are for treating the side effects of other drugs.
Quit taking them all and the side effects being treated go away.
The side effect of starving Pfizer et al is even better.
Meds, maybe, but they'll keep sending the fentanyl.
“Just another example of the Neocons not looking at the implications of starting wars. In this case, we can kiss goodbye our pharmaceutical supply”.
You are exactly right. And if we go to war with China, lots of people will die when the Chinese shut off the supply.
Bkmk
Hypertension, diabetes, cardiomyopathy, cancer, etc. are not diseases you can just decide to stop treating.
I got my hypertension under control with alternate day fasting and 45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise twice a day.
But you go ahead and love your Pfizer drugs, and be sure to watch all the Pfizer commercials so you can know what new drugs you need to be taking.
👍
Sorry, but that generalization is not true in my case either. After cancer surgery removed parts of my body, I require 3 drugs. Require, as in not optional. If I don’t have them, then I will die as I have no way to obtain vitamin B12, for example, except by injection. No B12 injections, then once I use up what my body has stored, then that is it for me as I can no longer create replacement red blood cells.
The cancer was probably a side-effect of the vaccines they have been shoving down our throats.
I got my hypertension under control with alternate day fasting and 45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise twice a day.
I’m glad for you. There are some of us that can’t help having to take prescription medications. My big one is Tacrolimus. I had a liver transplant almost two years ago, and there is no other alternative therapy for me- it’s an anti-rejection med, and I have to take it-no ifs, ands or buts about it.
Where’s it made? It could be China, for all I know. There is a shortage of it, but the specialty pharmacy I get it from assures me that they have an ample supply.
I agree that we, as a nation, are over-medicated in general.
It’s not that simple for some of us.
I have to accept the fact that it may be unavailable some day, then I’m screwed.
I blame the politicians, going back to Nixon and George Bush Sr. for opening up trade with China. It has caused us so MUCH over the years……..
Keto and intermittent fasting can cure much of that.
If anyone in leadership actually cared they’d be shouting 5hat from the rooftops and encouraging our population to get healthy.
The Chicoms have been doing our meds for years and now the Republicans finally wake up, they are a big joke and that also includes the Demorats.
I have complete contempt for the medical-industrial criminal complex that has declared biological war on the human race, in case you didn’t pick that up.
I tried the keto diet and after 7 or 8 days came extreme fatigue, vomiting, not thinking straight. I couldn’t keep food down.
Then I went out and bought some flatbread. Ate it slowly with water. In about and hour or two I was fine.
Not everyone can tolerate keto.
Keto doesn’t cure infections, diabetes, cancer, cardiomyopathy, etc. There are times you must have medicine; that’s why people live longer now than 200 years ago.
The point of the post was that many life saving medications are either from, or their precursors are from, mainland China.
The government should have never allow companies to make us this dependent on any one country. For instance if there is a bacterial infection killing many people and China cuts us off then we are up a creek without a paddle.
Sometimes things are more important than whatever the “business leaders” or the “chamber” want.
My wife who is a Stage IV cancer survivor and has had multiple colon and intestine resections has been on Fentynl patches for over 10 years and has been forced to go off them without any medical help this last month.
I think China cut a deal with the drug cartels but fortunately, my wife has the survivor instinct to go cold turkey.
BobL :” Just another example of the Neocons not looking at the implications of starting wars.
In this case, we can kiss goodbye our pharmaceutical supply. “
(From the article): ”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.
“Made in China”
“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.”
H/T to Heartlander and BobL for acquainting us to yet another social and economic national vulnerability !
Does China make the drugs for trans ‘transitioning’?
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