Another Shortage, This Time in Medicine

By Matthew McMullan
Apr 08 2020 |
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Coronavirus lays bare another manufacturing capacity problem.

As we’ve documented in the past few weeks, the coronavirus pandemic that’s currently tearing up American social and economic life is also exposing national security problems. Namely: The United States doesn’t have the capacity to quickly manufacture its way out of the acute supply shortages for medical equipment like facemasks and ventilators.

Well, we’re running out of drugs, too. An article in Vox, written by Lois Parshley, takes the time to explain that without the necessary drugs, the ventilators – machines used to keep very sick people breathing – aren’t of much use.

From the article:

Although President Trump has invoked the wartime Defense Production Act to start producing the additional 40,000 ventilators New York alone has requested, these won’t help stem the crisis for long without the drugs needed to use them — to say nothing of the freewheeling chaos of inter-state bidding wars for scarce supplies.

“If you say we need ventilators and not … the drugs to make them go, we’re going to have a ton of ventilators sitting around not being used,” said a healthcare industry executive to Vox. The article explains the drugs were in short supply before the pandemic hit; that scaling up production of them would take five weeks at minimum to get them into the hands of emergency room doctors; and points out that there’s not a lot of domestic capacity for pharmaceutical manufacturing anyway, as most of it now takes places in India and China.

We’ve been talking for a while now about how it’s, uh, unwise to source an absolute load of our drugs from a country – China, specifically – that might effectively weaponize its grip on production. China, in the middle of a pandemic, is not currently doing that. But one of its state-run media outlets recently made that specific threat in an editorial. So it’s not like the Chinese government hasn’t thought about it, either.

Listen to our interview below with Rosemary Gibson, who co-authored a book on China’s role as pharmacy to the world. And read the Vox article here.