Trump ’s Executive Order About U.S.-Made Drugs May Not Enhance Public Safety the Way It Should

Pharmaceutical manufacturing has long been a dirty business. The antibiotic-laced wastewater, and other pollutants it leaves behind, is just one of many reasons that so many American drug-manufacturing plants closed up over the last few decades and moved to places like Hyderabad, India, and China’s Zhejiang province, with their low labor costs and minimal regulations. But drug manufacturing in those remote outposts has been dirty in another way, as I learned from a decade of reporting that culminated in my book Bottle of Lies: the Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom. The FDA’s own inspection records, as analyzed by FDAzilla, reveal that drug plants in China and India are more likely than those in the U.S. and Europe to manipulate data about quality to make substandard low-cost drugs appear compliant with good manufacturing practices, standards required for export into the U.S. and other developed markets. On August 6, President Trump signed an executive order to encourage the federal government to buy American-made essential medicines. The goal—to rebuild America’s lost drug-manufacturing capacity—is critical. COVID-19, which has unleashed a global scramble for essential medicines, has crystallized the potential life-and-death consequences of our unhealthy dependence on low-cost generic drugs manufactured overseas. To date, amid a flurry of industry and legislative efforts, Trump’s order is the most high-profile effort to support “...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 feature Source Type: news