President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order Thursday that would encourage the production of certain drugs and medical supplies in the U.S., following shortages during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The order urges purchasers to buy American-made products and loosens federal drug-safety and environmental regulations that the administration says disadvantage domestic producers, among other measures.
The drugs and devices covered by the order are expected to include medicines used to respond to a public-health emergency or biohazard attack, among others. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said on a call with reporters that the Food and Drug Administration will come up with the list of essential medicines covered by the order, but he didn’t say by when.
“We’re dangerously overdependent on foreign nations for our essential medicines, for medical supplies like masks, gloves, goggles and the like, and medical equipment like ventilators” Navarro said on the call. “Across the world we have sweatshop labor, we have pollution havens, we have tax havens which have pulled our manufacturing offshore particularly for pharmaceuticals.”
Health-care providers have struggled to get the drugs or equipment they need during the pandemic because so many are made overseas. Researchers and lawmakers have decried that reliance on foreign suppliers for years, but the public outcry over drug and equipment shortages during the Covid-19 pandemic has increased attention on the issue.
The administration recently awarded a $765 million contract to Eastman Kodak Co. to make ingredients used in key generic medicines and a $354 million contract to generic drugmaker Phlow Corp. to make Covid-19 drugs and build new U.S.-based plants for so-called essential medicines and pharmaceutical ingredients.
Navarro said the order “establishes a base level of demand to attract a level of investment sufficient to provide for the needs we have for these things in times of trouble.”
Trump will travel to a Whirlpool Corp. plant in Ohio Thursday afternoon to sign the order.
The FDA has said about 80% of the key building blocks for medicine, called active pharmaceutical ingredients, come from outside the U.S. A large portion are made in China and India, countries where the FDA has discovered product-quality issues stemming from poor manufacturing practices.
Millions of blood-pressure drugs with ingredients made in China and India were recalled starting two years ago after it was discovered they contained chemicals that can cause cancer.
The Pentagon has also raised concern that relying on China for pharmaceutical ingredients is a national security risk.
In addition, the pandemic has revealed how disruption in other countries can leave Americans vulnerable after China temporarily halted the export of some products that
could be needed to treat Covid-19 patients, as well as other products, and threatened
to block the exports other medical equipment.
(Newsmax / Bloomberg).
