MR Mister Loc: Washington DC

Ask Congress: Why Are Most of Our Meds Made in China?

If China stopped exporting prescription drugs and their ingredients to the United States, pharmacy shelves across the country would empty within months. “That’s how dependent we are on China,” Rosemary Gibson told The New American. “It’s a national security threat that few people even know about.”

Most Pharmaceutical companies have moved out of America due to lawyers law suites over meds that were abused. Just look at what has happened to pain meds, fools overdosing to get high and the drug companies are sued out of business. So, now we have just 3 Pharmaceutical companies left. And so they are gun shy to make new drugs.

Gibson is a senior advisor at the Hastings Center and coauthor of China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine, a whistleblower analysis of the dire situation Western countries have brought about by allowing China to dump cheap prescriptions on them, driving domestic producers out of business. “The t***h is that America’s dependence on a single country for the active ingredients, raw materials, and chemical building blocks for so many essential medicines is a risk of epic proportions.”

That’s no exaggeration. The c*******t behemoth is well on its way to controlling the global generic drug market. In June the International Business Times reported that, though India still leads in generics, experts note that country receives some 80 percent of its raw ingredients from China. This means the key components in 90 percent of the prescription and over-the-counter meds Americans take are sourced from a country that our Department of Defense considers a major adversary.

“Think about how China devastated our steel industry, dumping its product here at below-market price and destroying our manufacturing base,” Gibson points out. “They want to do the same thing with medicine. They’ve already done it with penicillin.”

Penicillin is the go-to antibiotic for dozens of bacterial infections such as strep throat and children’s colds. It has been 15 years since the last U.S. penicillin plant closed its doors, in the midst of a massive Chinese campaign that dumped the antibiotic on the global market at extremely low prices. The industry trade association European Fine Chemicals Group dubbed the subsequent loss of business a “landslide.” By 2007, China dwarfed all remaining competitors and slapped a significant price increase on this common but crucial medicine.

Other antibiotics stand in the cross hairs: bio-warfare safeguard ciprofloxacin, anthrax antidote doxycycline, and vancomycin, a last-resort antibiotic for drug-resistant infections. The anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill in 2001 offer a chilling example. Unable to supply our own needs, “The U.S. government turned to a European company to buy 20 million doses of the recommended treatment for anthrax exposure, doxycycline,” explains Gibson. “That company had to buy the chemical starting material from China. What if China were the anthrax attacker?”

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Common high blood pressure medications such as losartan; chemotherapy drugs for children and adults; birth control pills; antidepressants and psychotherapeutics; anti-seizure meds for epilepsy; and drugs to treat Alzheimer’s Disease, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and Parkinson’s, as well as medical implants and devices — all of these make the “made in China” list, as do over-the-counter pain k**lers and vitamins. Chances are many of the pills you and your loved ones take each day contain ingredients from China.

Even the vitamin C that supplements your breakfast cereal is probably Chinese. Along with penicillin, we ceded ascorbic acid (the active ingredient in vitamin C) to China in the early 2000s. The last U.S. production facility shuttered a short time after Congress passed the U.S.-China Trade Relations Act of 2000 — a measure that then-President Bill Clinton promised would secure American jobs and safeguard against surges of Chinese imports. Instead, China’s predatory pricing crushed U.S. producers and wiped out jobs. After they obtained dominance, Chinese firms raised the price of ascorbic acid by as much as 600 percent. The ensuing anti-trust lawsuit brought by U.S. businesses against the offenders revealed that the Chinese government “required its domestic companies to fix prices and control exports of vitamin C,” relates Gibson. Aspirin’s active ingredient, acetylsalicylic acid, suffered an identical fate from a Chinese cartel.

Think You’re Immune?

Do you want to find out the source of your meds? You likely won’t read it on labels or product literature. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only requires drug makers to list the name and place of manufacture or distribution, not country of origin. A company here may take powders and pound them into pills, but the powders themselves could all come from China. Call the manufacturer, and you may be told either that the source information is proprietary or that the company has worldwide sources, subject to change over time. Results of online searches are iffy, though Gibson lists sites such as DailyMed and Drugs.com as good leads.

Why is Big Pharma so tight-lipped about its sources? Pharmaceutical companies do not want to undermine their integrity by admitting they buy from China. For many American consumers, “made in China” means shoddy workmanship and poor quality. When it comes to medicines, imperfect ingredients can have severe, even life-threatening, effects.

Take the case of contaminated heparin in 2007 and 2008, when 246 Americans, including some children, died, and hundreds more were seriously injured after receiving the common blood thinner, used daily in U.S. hospitals and dialysis centers. As the body count rose, the FDA investigated to discover the culprit: a toxic contaminant deliberately placed during the manufacturing process in China. It was used because a fierce v***s called blue-ear disease had decimated China’s pig population in 2006. (Heparin is made from pig intestines.) The price of pigs skyrocketed, and oversulfated chondroitin sulfate, substituted for as much as 60 percent of the safe ingredient, was deemed acceptable because it mimicked the real product — and saved lots of money. When U.S. officials complained, China denied responsibility, blaming its U.S. customer. But that doesn’t explain the deaths and adverse reactions reported in 10 other countries that also imported the contaminated heparin.

Gibson tells the story of one survivor, an Arizona physician who went into the hospital for a simple endoscopy procedure and, after receiving the contaminated heparin, ended up requiring heart and kidney t***splants. He will spend the rest of his life on immunosuppressive drugs that prevent his i****e s****m from attacking the t***splanted organs — a high price to pay for cheap medicine.

https://www.thenewamerican.com/print-magazine/item/33305-china-making-your-medicine

Radiance3

================
America, everything coming from China must end now. Too high a price to pay for cheap products which end up you the loser at the end. Don't complain about the tariffs that president Trump impost in China. It is to protect us consumers and at the same time protecting the greatest economic imbalance which allowed China running to top the US and other countries on its economy.

That is not only the objectives of China's deceptive betrayals of stealing our intellectual properties. China's goal is more than that. But on its global desires to control. Be aware that China has manipulated the Pacific countries on its trade business but also captured illegally lands that don't belong to China. The Spratly Islands taken by China illegally where they installed military power preventing the West from business dealing with the Pacific Rim countries. Its objective is monopoly.