The United States has doubled in its reliance on imports of needles and syringes from China and other countries in the past six years, even though President Joe Biden has recently touted efforts to manufacture products in the United States. and more than that, putting Americans at risk.
According to Sens. Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the U.S. imported only a fraction of the 10 million needles and syringes it used every day in 2018. It was 15%. But that rate is now 40 percent, the senators said in a recent op-ed.
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Not only are American lives at risk from defective needles and syringes made in China, but four out of six U.S. manufacturing sites have been shut down, the senators said.
Ricketts and Blumenthal I have written In Wednesday’s RealClearPolitics op-ed:
As we have learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, relying on healthcare products manufactured outside the United States carries significant risks. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently investigating reports of defective syringes made in China. Leaking or broken syringes can have serious medical consequences, including administering the wrong dose of medication. This can be a fatal mistake.
The senators noted that U.S. companies and manufacturers have ramped up production of “everything from ventilators to hand sanitizer” during the COVID-19 pandemic and called for that to continue. Ta.
Ricketts and Blumenthal added:
Without a resilient domestic supply chain for medical supplies, our nation’s crisis response and public health are at risk. The most effective way to ensure the quality of these products is to manufacture them in the United States. If we don’t change course soon, we risk losing our last syringe manufacturing facility, which would leave the US primarily dependent on China. This is a mistake we cannot forgive.
It’s not just needles and syringes that have been imported in large quantities from China in recent years, but also other important supplies such as medical rubber gloves.
Scott Meyer, CEO of American manufacturer Bluestar NBR, said in an interview on SiriusXM. Breitbart News Saturday In a recent exclusive interview, he said, “What happened is that supply from China went from about 14 percent of our supply at the end of last year to about 44 percent of our supply. And you know, on the current trajectory, We will have about two-thirds of that by the end of this year.”
He said that under the Trump administration, the government awarded him a contract to build a factory to make synthetic rubber for gloves, and encouraged him to build an adjacent factory to actually make the gloves.
A worker checks the quality of medical gloves at a factory in Tangshan, Hebei Province, China, June 28, 2021. (Photo credit: Zhang Yongxin/VCG, Getty Images)
But with inflation and rising costs of energy and building materials, Meyer and others who won the contract need more money to complete the project. He said his company completed construction on its rubber factory last spring, but would need more money to connect with utilities and build a glove factory, but the Biden administration refused to complete it and instead built a new company with another company. He said he had signed a contract. Construction goes back even further.
His factory in rural southwestern Virginia will meet 17 percent of the nation’s annual demand for 120 billion masks for everything from doctor’s visits to meal preparation. But in the fall, the company had to temporarily shut down its state-of-the-art rubber factory.
“We’re just one example,” Meyer said. “For nitrile gloves alone, he has six other companies in the same situation, 80% complete, but not producing anything. This cost him nearly $700 million in investment.”
“If you look at the $17 billion that has been spent, there are probably 50 or 60 companies that own these facilities that are probably 80, 90 percent complete but aren’t actually producing anything.” he added. “Again, we need to make sure that the critical items that we need are manufactured here in the United States, or at least some of them, so that we never end up in a situation where we can’t get these critical items.”
President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday, March 7, 2024, at the Capitol in Washington. (Shaun Hsu/Pool via AP)
Despite allowing China to capture a larger share of the U.S. market for these critical medical supplies, Biden argued in Thursday’s State of the Union:
And now, instead of importing foreign products and exporting American jobs, we are exporting American products and creating American jobs. Here in America, where they belong! … Buy American has been the law of the land since the 1930s. Past administrations, including my predecessor, have failed at Buy American.
No more. On my watch, federal projects like those that help build America’s roads, bridges, and highways are done using American products, made by American workers, and create good-paying American jobs. Probably.
“To see all the effort that has gone into this, to see a state-of-the-art facility that is largely in storage that can produce critical items that this country needs,” Maier told Breitbart News. We welcome anyone who wants to come.” We desperately need it. But instead, we are simply becoming more dependent on China than we were before the pandemic began. ”
Meanwhile, Ricketts and Blumenthal are calling on the Biden administration to tighten regulations on foreign manufacturers.
The senators called on the FDA to inspect foreign manufacturing facilities more regularly and enforce existing rules. They said the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last inspected a hypodermic syringe manufacturing facility in China in 2018. They recently announced that the FDA issued The recommendation was about the possibility of syringe failure, but warned that more needs to be done to protect Americans.
It also directed the Office of Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) to explore ways to support the domestic supply chain by investing in U.S. manufacturing of critical health care products and support markets for these products through vendor-managed stockpiles. asked to do so. Inventory strategy and bulk purchasing.
We also asked the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to investigate the actions of Brazil, India, and China in enacting tariffs to protect their manufacturing industries, and to determine the best course of action to level the playing field for U.S. manufacturers. asked to decide.
