Posted on 02/28/2020 10:02:59 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Until about the third week of January, only a few pharmaceutical executives, drug-safety inspectors and dogged China hawks cared that a large share of the world’s supply of antibiotics depends on a handful of Chinese factories. These include a cluster in Inner Mongolia, a northern province of windswept deserts, grasslands and unlovely industrial towns. Then came the covid-19 outbreak, and quarantine controls that locked down factories, ports and whole cities across China.
Chinese leaders insist that they are well on the way to conquering the virus, allowing them to reopen “leading enterprises and key links with important influence” in global supply chains. A victory over the novel coronavirus will once again demonstrate “the notable advantages of leadership by the Communist Party of China”, President Xi Jinping told 170,000 officials by video-conference on February 23rd. But even if all those boasts come true, foreign governments and business bosses will not quickly forget a frightening lesson: for some vital products, they depend on one country.
Where once only a few specialists worried about the market share enjoyed by the industrial chemists of Hohhot or Shijiazhuang, China’s dominance of the active pharmaceutical ingredient (api) sector is now the subject of hard questions in Washington’s corridors of power and the chancelleries of Europe.
Ending the world’s dependence on Chinese apis would not be a technical challenge. China has not been dominant for long. America’s last penicillin fermenter closed in 2004, as clusters of Chinese factories, many state-owned or subsidised, offered efficiencies that foreign rivals could not match. Rather, change would involve upending well-established political and economic theories, starting with the wisdom of allowing private companies to seek out the best-value goods, with little heed paid to their origin.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Not as if it was not suggested...
Hard lesson?
If Jobs were still alive he would be building a new factory in Mexico by now................
I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m a big fan of profits, but I’m not a fan of profit above all else. It seems there are enough profit above all else types to keep China’s factories humming.
Trump should turn it into an election issue how Clinton, Bush2, and 0bama put our national security in danger by allowing anti-biotics other medical necessities to be made in China. Put America first and require that all medical equipment and medicins be made in the USA.
The lesson should stick for a couple weeks at least!
….which Trump began warning everyone about in 2016.
Geez.....these guys are JUST NOW realizing this???
They need to read Rosemary Gibson’s China Rx...she’s been sounding the alarm, for a few years.
I’m not a fan of profits when American lives and health are at risk.
Congress/globalists don’t seem to give a flip.
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Same here. When this goes away it will be business back to normal in China.
"Cheapest is Best! But what if-- CHEAPEST. IS. BEST."
“Congress/globalists don’t seem to give a flip.”
Those are the profits above all else types. They are despicable.
I guess Ross Perot had a lot of good points to make about such things. As the years go by I become more and more glad I voted for him.
Oh, THAT’s being shared!
How would you have had them stop it? Government takeover of the pharmaceutical industry?
That's me. Pretty much "law of the jungle" economics-wise, but even that needs a great deal of responsibility and ethics to work.
Trump was WAY AHEAD of the curve on moving companies within the supply chain out of China and back to the US...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/01/trump-ordered-us-firms-to-ditch-china-but-many-already-have.html
https://investorplace.com/2017/01/10-companies-bringing-jobs-back-to-america/
https://www.tecma.com/chinese-manufacturing-companies/
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