Covid-19 Pandemic Challenges.. Predictable?

These past several months have been the craziest of my life.  Sorry it has been a bit since I posted an article, but I felt like business topics took a backseat to numerous other things that the global pandemic of Covid-19 has shown all of us are more important.

Although this coronavirus epidemic was not welcome, it is strongly believed that this has highlighted a longstanding vulnerability for our country through its reliance on China.  This reliance could leave the USA dangerously short of medicines in the unfortunate event of a global pandemic, war, or trade/export conflict. I decided to research this a bit and was shocked at what I discovered.

While the US remains a global leader in drug discovery, much of the manufacturing has moved offshore, primarily to China. Actually the last American plant to make key ingredients for something like penicillin, closed its doors over 15 years ago.

As I learned from an article by Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, China has managed to dominate all aspects of the supply chain. Many people know China produces car parts, toys, and electronics, but it is also responsible for the manufacturing of penicillin, antibiotics and pain medicines used across the globe, as well as surgical masks and medical devices.

In fact less than two months ago, the FDA warned that one drug was already in short supply in the United States because of manufacturing issues, and said it was monitoring about 20 others in which the USA relies on China.

The question now is whether the government can encourage more private companies to rework their supply chains, or incentivize new manufacturing start-ups. It will be interesting to see how much progress will be made on this front in 2020.  It certainly is a strange year thus far.

“The coronavirus shows the importance of bringing all of that manufacturing back to America, and we will have that started,”  – President Donald J. Trump