The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Creating a Drug Supply Crisis Just When We Most Need Medicine

As the world scrambles for a magic pharmaceutical bullet to stop the coronavirus, drugs perceived as cures – despite reed-thin evidence — have vanished from pharmacy shelves. Just last Friday, after President Trump touted the still unproven remedy of a malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, the Food and Drug Administration lifted a restriction it had imposed on a Indian drug manufacturer with a record of manipulating its quality data, to allow it to make the active ingredient now suddenly in hot demand. With the United States long dependent on foreign drug manufacturers for low-cost medicine and key drug ingredients, it is little wonder that we have arrived at this frightening moment, with the FDA allowing companies that it didn’t even trust enough last month to make any drug for the American public, to now churn out unproven drug ingredients for a largely untested off-label use. Coronavirus has now done what years of U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports and congressional hearings could not achieve. It has laid bare the full perils of our dependence on an overseas drug supply. Not only has this pandemic intensified already serious drug shortages. But question marks loom over the safety of the drugs we are able to procure. Experts have long warned this day would come. Last July, a Pentagon official testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission that U.S. dependence on Chinese-made prescription-drug ingredients constituted a...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news