*Originally published in The Cornell Review Full Edition on April 26, 2020*
Two weeks before the first case of community spread of COVID-19 was detected in the U.S., President Trump’s senior trade advisor Peter Navarro warned of potential shortages in essential medical supplies. Navarro has been working for the President since his campaign in 2016 and has been a key influence on Trump’s trade platform. He called the emergence of the novel virus a “wake-up call” for an issue long-ignored. According to Navarro, the United States was overly dependent on imports from China and other countries for medical and pharmaceutical supplies.
The White House advisor was not alone in his concern. A book titled “China RX: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine” was published in 2018 and discussed some major risks in the foreign drug supply chain, including documented cases of illness and death due to contaminated Chinese imports. In an interview with the Epoch Times, author Rosemary Gibson pointed out that medicine could easily be used as a weapon of war, as food was during WWII. She advocated that medicine should be treated as a strategic asset, along with food and oil. Gibson also mentioned “Made in China 2025,” Beijing’s strategy to upgrade from producing low-value, low-quality goods to dominating manufacturing in high-value fields such as the pharmaceutical industry.
The strategy is working. Michael R. Wessel, a commissioner of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, noted during a congressional hearing in October 2019 that China had driven many U.S. lines of pharmaceutical production offshore or out of business. The last penicillin plant closed down in 2004. As of August 2019, 72% of all active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) supplying the U.S. market were made overseas, according to Janet Woodcock, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research of the FDA.
In the market for protective gear and other medical goods, we are seeing problems with offshore production. On April 16, the Wall Street Journal reported new export restrictions in China stranding U.S.-bound medical goods. 3M was told to wait for Beijing to lift the restrictions in order to receive more shipments; General Electric had its shipment of ventilator parts delayed for days; PerkinElmer is waiting to be cleared to ship 1.4 million test kits; Owens & Minor and Emory Healthcare both have masks stuck in Chinese warehouses, while Cellex is not able to fill orders for antibody tests from at least four state governments.
What about the American producers that make medical supplies here at home? Michael Bowen, co-owner of Prestige Ameritech, the biggest domestic manufacturer of surgical masks, expressed his frustration in an interview with NPR. The demand for masks had shot up since the start of the pandemic, he was flooded with emails requesting masks, but he simply could not ramp up production enough to meet this demand. During the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, Prestige Ameritech rose to the occasion, bought a bigger factory, built machines, and hired more workers. After the pandemic, the people he helped went right back to foreign producers, and his company had to lay off workers and almost went bankrupt. He had been advocating for domestic production of essential supplies for 14 years and hoped that people were finally listening. “I don’t want to say, I told you so. I just want to help everybody,” Bowen said. His story is a testimony to “the high cost of low prices,” as Peter Navarro once put it. The abandonment of American businesses and American workers in favor of cheap prices and cheap labor has led to domestic producers’ inability to meet demands during times of crisis.
President Trump’s platform of reviving domestic manufacturing is more than bringing back jobs and keeping America working. It is securing the production of essential goods during times of international turbulence and is ultimately a matter of national security. If we haven’t learned the lesson from the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, now is the time to correct our supply chain and return to domestic medical manufacturing. The health and safety of the American people should not depend on the stability and cooperation of a foreign nation, they must be taken care of right here at home, where America is put first.
