As the war of words between China and the U.S. over COVID-19 heats up, Chinese state media have raised the specter of using Beijing’s pharmaceutical leverage to block critical components and supplies for dependent U.S. drug companies and send America into “the hell of a novel coronavirus epidemic.”

While India and several European nations play critical roles in the global medical supply chain, China is among the top providers of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) — the basic components for antibiotics and other prescription drugs consumed by Americans.

With the coronavirus crisis threatening to strain the U.S. government’s large stockpiles of such drugs, health experts warn that China’s own outbreak and related societal shutdown could mean major shortages ahead as Chinese factories struggle to keep up production of the APIs.

But today, the majority of ingredients necessary to make your medicine, more than 80%, are sourced from China. U.S. dependence on China for the raw ingredients required to make medicines has become a national security concern.

The Trump administration and lawmakers from both parties are now calling for a dramatic revamping of domestic U.S. drug manufacturing operations that have been outsourced to China and a handful of other nations over the past two decades.


 Pharma Letter, an online news site covering the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, offered some stark numbers on U.S. dependence on Chinese producers.

China, the newsletter reported Tuesday, “accounted for 95% of U.S. imports of ibuprofen, 91% of U.S. imports of hydrocortisone, 70% of U.S. imports of acetaminophen, 40% to 45% of U.S. imports of penicillin and 40% of U.S. imports of heparin, according to Commerce Department data. In all, 80% of the US supply of antibiotics are made” in China.

Even without a conscious boycott policy by the Beijing government, the disruption to Chinese domestic production caused by the pandemic is straining the global system.

Since 2010, China has doubled its manufacturing facilities that make these essential ingredients. At the same time, we have closed down a massive number of our own facilities that were once the mainstay of New Jersey’s economy.

The more fraught U.S.-China tensions become, the more likely China is to cut off antibiotic exports, jolting our healthcare system into turmoil. This dire warning was sounded by Hastings Center health expert Rosemary Gibson when she testified at the July 2019 federal U.S.-China Economic and Safety Review Commission hearing. She cautioned about the dangers of American reliance on China for life-saving drugs.

If the U.S. were attacked with anthrax, she explained, China would be the source for ciprofloxacin or doxycycline, antibiotics needed to treat victims. “What if China were the anthrax attacker?” Gibson posed. She further testified that the centralization of the global pharmaceutical supply chain in a single country places it at risk of interruption, whether “by mistake or design." China’s goal, she asserted, has been to disrupt, dominate, and displace American companies and harm the U.S.'s ability to make its own medicine: “In five to 10 years, we [will be] at risk of losing our generic drug industry because China will use the same playbook and undercut our own producers and drive them out of business,” she said.

“It was a blunder of epic proportions that we allowed the manufacture of penicillin to leave our shores,” said Rosemary Gibson, the author of the 2018 book “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine.”

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https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2...ug-exports-us/

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