Reliance on foreign-made drugs could undermine national security, experts say

WASHINGTON, D.C. (NBC) – Health officials want to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign-made pharmaceutical ingredients. The issue took center stage at a House Commerce subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

According to the FDA, only 28% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients, which are the drug’s basic building blocks, are actually manufactured in the U.S. the remaining are produced in other countries with 13% being in China.

Director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Dr. Janet Woodcock said, “There’s no incentive to make these drugs. You could make, if you’re a genetic manufacturer, you could make newer generics that have much higher prices. And so people drop off, and so maybe the last person standing is in someplace far away.”

Experts are citing lower labor costs, lighter regulation and the pressure to made drugs cheaper as some of the factors for the shift. However, experts say that has also made it harder for regulators to police the quality.

“To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson, ‘What’s in your medicine cabinet?’ Our citizens have a right to know,” state Michael Wessel of the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission.

Experts say this reliance on other countries could pose a risk to national security.

“In terms of global medical supply chains, increasingly all roads lead to China. Those roads are rocky, sometimes treacherous and all to often, unsafe,” Wessel said. “I would say they have weaponized certain responses to the current tariff tensions, trade tensions between our two countries to try to maximize their political response. They could very well do it in this sector if they so chose.”