April 11, 2025 - Epoch Times
08:15
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The United States depends on China for 95% of the key components that are necessary to make our generic drugs. | |
| And if China shut the door on exports within months, our healthcare system would begin to collapse. | |
| That's how dependent we are. | |
| And it's not just us. | |
| The world is dependent. | |
| Europe is dependent. | |
| Because China has a chokehold And I recall that it's about 91% of the prescribed medicines in the U.S. are actually these generics. | |
| So this is massive. | |
| It's huge. | |
| And whatever hospital you're in, whether it's all the big-name hospitals, what they use are generic drugs. | |
| Well, this may be obvious to some of our viewers. | |
| Why is this a problem? | |
| Well, as China Rx predicted a lot of what happened, that in the event of a natural disaster, global pandemic, or a geopolitical event, the United States will be waiting in line behind other countries to get vital medicines | |
| to save people's lives. | |
| We have lost our industrial base. | |
| And during the pandemic, we had rationing of vital medicines in this country. | |
| It wasn't called rationing. | |
| That would scare the public. | |
| The media didn't call it rationing. | |
| The euphemism used in the industry is, well, Dr. So-and-so, we won't be able to deliver those drugs to you today. | |
| They're, quote, on allocation, which means they're actually allocating whatever they have in certain... | |
| So we were rationing drugs in the United States. | |
| And this is because what? | |
| Spell it out for me here. | |
| This is why. | |
| Because we have lost our industrial base to be able to make the medicines, 90% of our medicine supply. | |
| We can't make it anymore. | |
| We can't make antibiotics anymore in this country from beginning to end. | |
| We can't make penicillin. | |
| We can't make those antibiotics needed to treat sepsis, which can kill you. | |
| We can't make the antibiotics to treat pneumonia, sexually transmitted diseases. | |
| We offshore that. | |
| And that's a risk of huge, tremendous national security. | |
| And if I may say, while we were very focused on treating viral infections, what about bacterial infections? | |
| And during the pandemic in the early 1900s, what people died of was not viral infection, but bacterial infections. | |
| And they died because we didn't have antibiotics. | |
| And if you remember, back in March 2020, China said, well, if the U.S. doesn't do what we want, we could withhold antibiotics from the United States. | |
| Think of that. | |
| Well, I think, you know, I remember when that happened, and I was thinking about our interview, right, because this was basically the case in point. | |
| Absolutely right. | |
| We have a system that is perfectly designed for catastrophic failure and significant loss of human life. | |
| And that has to change. | |
| And it's fixable. | |
| This is a man-made | |
| You know, it strikes me there's basically two dimensions here of the problem, right? | |
| One is, you know, where they're being made. | |
| So, you know, we know a lot of them come from India, but we also know that a very significant portion of what's made in India... | |
| Those components come from China, so it's really China. | |
| China Rx exposed that, and this was a big shock to me. | |
| We all think of India, which is a great generic powerhouse, but then you look more deeply, and during a COVID pandemic, the Indian government actually came out and said that we depend, and our generic industry depends on China for 69% of the components it needs for its industry. | |
| I can't think of any other You're giving me a 95% number. | |
| just explain to me how you got there. | |
| Sure, well, first off, we're talking about thousands of different raw materials and chemicals that are used to make our medicines generic and branded drugs. | |
| And where I got the 95% | |
| figure from is from people who actually make medicines. | |
| They are pharmaceutical engineers. | |
| They are CEOs of companies. | |
| So I'll tell you a quick story. | |
| So in February of 2020, when a virus was coming from east to west and going to hit North America, I was having dinner with five extraordinary people who had a combined experience of 150 years in making medicine. | |
| So I asked him this question as the entree was being served. | |
| I said, so we're going to need generic medicines to take care of very sick people in intensive care units, emergency rooms. | |
| What percentage of the components needed to make those medicines are sourced from China? | |
| And it was 90%, 95%, 90%, 95%, 95% as we went around the table. | |
| So that's One data point from people who have to go source from distributors and they in turn, this is their business, it's what they do. | |
| It's like you're a chef and you know where all your ingredients come from and who are the best sources and the country of origin often of where they're made, where they're produced. | |
| Another data point is a wonderfully respected leader in Europe who ran a company that supplied actually generics to our military. | |
| He said that it's about 98% of our generic drugs depend on some component from China. | |
| And another executive from Holland, now retired, he said China owns that raw material market globally. | |
| And even the Europeans are concerned that what if they decide to withdraw that? | |
| And talking about this first dimension, which is where all of these things coming from China, it's hard to fathom that that could have ever happened. | |
| After that threat of withholding during the COVID pandemic, what has changed? | |
| Have we been rushing to bring back those supply chains, repatriate them to America and the West, or friend shore, as they call it, perhaps, as well? | |
| Overall, I think there's been very little change. | |
| Companies have habits of how they purchase, and they want to purchase the cheapest product. | |
| And we can talk more about this later and how that system works. | |
| But if you have a focus only on cheap and not quality and value, it can really get you into trouble. | |
| Here's how the antibiotic market, how we lost that. | |
| Our last penicillin fermentation plant. | |
| China dumped I think the reason that we're not winning on this yet | |
| is because China has a strategy. | |
| And it knows exactly the pain points of each country and each region. | |
| And if they see a move in one direction for an important product, they can say, well, we're going to dump a product, lower the price, and that will deter Western manufacturers from getting back into the game. | |
| And we don't have a strategy like that. | |
| Let me disqualify this, that the strategy is not just commercial. |
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