CPA advocates for domestic manufacturing of essential generic drugs, personal protective equipment (PPE), and other critical health care products because it is vital for our country’s health security and national security.
COVID-19 showed that in a pandemic, the United States cannot depend on other countries for essential medicines and other medical supplies. Many countries banned exports of them to assure they had enough for their own people.
It is a national security imperative that our country is not dependent on unfriendly nations. At the height of the pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party threatened to withhold essential drugs from America. This threat reveals the inclination by some nations to use medicines as an economic and geopolitical weapon. We must have the capability to manufacture medicines and medical supplies necessary for the country’s public health and survival.
Following April’s trade deficit data, which showed a complete freefall in trade during the “Liberation Day” tariff month, May’s trade deficit rose by 18.7% on a monthly basis to $71.5 billion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).
America is facing a growing crisis in its medical system — not from a lack of talent or innovation, but from a breakdown in the control, safety and supply of essential medicine. Our growing reliance on imports is now driving serious drug shortages, destabilizing supply chains and increasingly making medications unsafe.
In the U.S. today, frontline cancer treatments are being rationed. ERs are short on sedatives. Amoxicillin—one of the most prescribed antibiotics in the country—has been in critical shortage. These are not temporary disruptions. They reflect a structural breakdown caused by the erosion of America’s pharmaceutical manufacturing base and a decades-long surge in generic drug imports.
U.S. based generic drug makers need government support to expand – and maybe even to survive – the onslaught of imports nearly every member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Health said in a hearing on Wednesday.
The second round of the early 2000s ‘China Shock’ will impact the rest of the world more than it will the United States. Tariffs and industrial policies – like the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act – have somewhat protected the U.S. from China’s relentless exports.
By the time the Committee hearing with Lutnick was over, it seemed pretty clear that the Trump administration has shifting ideas about reciprocity today, and are less sure about the nature of them than they were before “Liberation Day” on April 2.
