The United States should not greenlight Chinese drugs while drowning American companies in red tape, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said during an event with Breitbart News, highlighting the threats of China.
Part of the discussion centered around the shocking reality that the U.S. is allowing Chinese companies to make knockoffs or compounds of American drugs with what host Matthew Boyle described as “cheap, weird ingredients that they’re unclear about.”
These are pushed into the country, and the FDA is still green listing the products. Cotton said that should not be happening.
“Unfortunately, again, China, using illegitimate means, has a lot of the pharmaceutical market cornered. Many of our – not, not super high end cutting edge drugs, but just very basic medicines like ibuprofen and acetaminophen, penicillin, heparin,” Cotton said, explaining that China “has cornered the market on that over the decades, and that’s a dangerous place to be.”
“We take it for granted. You can just go to Walmart and pick up a bottle of ibuprofen if you want, but trying to cut us off, that’s a big problem. Or if your kids got an ear infection and you can’t get antibiotics because China’s cut us off, that’s a big problem,” the senator continued:
This specific one is very worrisome as well, because, again, you’re not talking about mass produced, not on the scale of something like ibuprofen or acetaminophen, but compounded drugs. And understandably, if you or a loved one you know has some illness, and you can get a compounded drug that’s much cheaper and you don’t even realize it’s got adulterated Chinese components in it, you’re going to do that to treat your illness or to treat your loved ones illness. And there’s, unfortunately, several cases of people falling ill or even dying from these compounded drugs. So I think we need to draw a very firm line that we can’t accept … these kind of adulterated Chinese compounded drugs into our country.
Cotton also spoke about what would happen if tensions escalated and China cut the drugs from the U.S.
“And they’ve done it before. You know, in 2010 I think it was, they threatened to cut Japan off from rare earth elements that Japan needs just as much as we do in their advanced manufacturing, over a dispute of some islands between Japan and China,” he said.
“In 2020 at the very beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when President Trump and I were pointing out that China had unleashed plague on the world, communist apparatchik threatened to withhold not just drugs, but basic medical supplies as well – latex gloves, masks, face shields, for doctors, that kind of thing,” he said, concluding that China would “absolutely do that.”
“They’ve made it clear by their actions and their words,” Cotton explained, adding that the U.S. needs to have more capability to produce these or have a reserve or get them from friendlier countries.
The senator added that the “needless” red tape in the U.S. needs to go.
“We shouldn’t be green lighting Chinese drugs while we’re drowning American pharmaceutical and biotech companies in red tape and making it harder for them to build new manufacturing facilities,” the Arkansas senator said.
“Move more quickly through clinical trials, get more drugs onto the market. Some of it would have to be through the purchasing power of the U.S. government as well, between Medicare, Medicaid, Department of Defense, the VA,” he explained.
Cotton added, “That’s a lot of purchasing power, and I don’t think we should be using U.S. tax dollars to underwrite Chinese drug companies when they can underwrite American drug companies, again, at a fairly reasonable cost.”
WATCH the event below:
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