How China Controls America’s Healthcare Supply Chains: Victor Suarez

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This is the 30 minute TV version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with Victor Suarez. The longer-form version was released on Epoch TV on December 5, 2024.

🔴 Watch the extended version of this episode: https://ept.ms/Y1205VictorSuarez

“About 20% of what we call Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) are solely sourced from China… The area that I'd say we need to really pay attention to is the solely sourced precursors, or APIs, the active pharmaceutical ingredients that come from China, which means, if they stopped supplying them to the US market or to our allies in Europe, that means we don't have any other alternative.”

Jan Jekielek sits down with Victor Suarez, a retired U.S. Army colonel who served for 27 years and saw, firsthand, serious problems with America’s medical supply chains. In this interview, he breaks down key steps America can take to secure its vital medicines.

“You can literally make all the components of all these drugs in China, you can ship them in a barrel to some plant in New Jersey, mix it, compound it, package and label it, and say ‘made in the USA,’ and then sell it to the Department of Defense. Now, that’s the number one thing I would ask a Congress and the president—to fix that loophole through legislation immediately. They can fix that in the NDAA a week from now, if they were really serious about it.”

CHAPTER TITLES
0:00:00 - The Vulnerability of America's Medical Supply Chains
0:01:01 - The Shift of Critical Supply Chains Overseas
0:02:07 - Key Vulnerabilities in National Security
0:04:35 - Victor Suarez's Military Background and Expertise
0:08:00 - Involvement in Operation Warp Speed
0:10:53 - Dependence on Chinese Medical Precursors
0:13:34 - The Scale of the Vulnerability
0:16:19 - Issues with Substandard Medicines
0:18:26 - Priorities for Addressing the Vulnerabilities
0:23:11 - Closing the CITRIS Loophole and Strengthening the Strategic API Reserve

“Over the last 20 to 30 years, we've shifted with globalization a lot of our critical supply chains to make very important products, whether it's automobiles, whether it's electronics, whether it's our pharmaceuticals, have shifted primarily to Asia because it was much cheaper. They had access to free or cheap labor. Environmental regulations weren't as strong over there, where they were becoming very difficult.”

Victor Suarez about our biggest vulnerabilities from a national security perspective: “One area with very strong vulnerability that a lot of people don't talk about, is the area of critical chemicals, accelerants, propellants, things that are made in chemistry that actually propel some of our most exquisite defense systems. Another area is US healthcare and life sciences and biotechnology. And that's really the chemicals and the precursors that go into our everyday medicines. For US healthcare, and as those shifted overseas to places like China, we see an overwhelming majority of those precursor materials coming from our number one adversary."

About essential medicines: “There is a list of what they call vital medicines, like 100 vital medicines in the United States. These are medicines that are so essential to US healthcare that if we didn't have them, we would have major, major problems with people that are dependent on these medicines. These aren't just everyday hay fever allergy medicines. These are sometimes necessary for people so they don't die. Out of those 100 or so, their analysis came up with over 80% of those vital medicines have some kind of precursor, key starting material that originates from China. And so when people say, ‘Well, maybe we can just pivot to buying some of our medicines cheaper from India’, but when you look at India, a super majority of their precursors API comes from China.”

Suarez about America’s Strategic Reserve of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients: “We need to do something about the Strategic API Reserve. The Strategic API Reserve is a facility that we spent hundreds of millions of dollars building - it’s tornado rated. It's a secure building, and it was designed to have the nation's stockpile of active pharmaceutical ingredients, key starting materials and other other chemicals that were pertinent to stabilize essential medicines for the United States in time of crisis, to be paralleled with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That facility is only 1% full, and I argue that for a couple 10s of millions of dollars, you could pretty much go on a shopping spree and fill that up and basically take off all the leverage from our adversaries on essential medicine production.”

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