American Pharmaceutical Resilience

Scott LincicomeShortly after the COVID-19 outbreak began last year, numerous politicians and pundits proclaimed that the pandemic revealed massive vulnerabilities in global supply chains for essential medical goods — vulnerabilities that imperiled Americans’ health and national security and therefore necessitated major government interventions (read: subsidies and protectionism) to bolster U.S. supply chain “resiliency.” Pharmaceuticals, in particular, topped the list of medical goods that required gov ernment action, and the alleged threat to American pharmaceutical access — supposedly dependent on China and India — was so dire that the Trump administrationfast ‐​tracked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support to domestic producers of drugs and raw materials in order to “reduce reliance on other countries for drugs.”At the time, I and othersnotedrepeatedly that, while there were some gaps in the public data, the information we had on U.S. pharmaceutical production, R&D, and trade did not indicate a forthcoming pharmaceutical crisis. Now, the nonpartisan United States International Trade Commission has provided additional data in a massive new report on “U.S. industries producing COVID-19 related goods and the supply chain challenges and constraints that impacted the availability of such goods,” which for the most part confirms that our skepticism was warranted.The report overall reveals a far more complicated and ben...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs