In a new Agenda47 video, former President Donald J. Trump announced his plan to end pharmaceutical shortages and return the manufacture of life-saving drugs to the United States.
“This is not just a public health crisis, it’s a national security crisis,” President Trump said. “As part of my plan to obtain total independence from China, we will phase in tariffs and import restrictions to bring back production of all essential medicines to the United States of America where they belong. I signed an executive order to begin this process in 2020 but Biden has shamefully failed to follow through.”
Trump took historic action in 2020 to ensure essential medicines were produced in the United States, but Joe Biden reversed the order in 2021.
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There are severe shortages of over 295 medications—a record five-year high.
Trump vows to:
– Restore his Executive Order 13944, dated August 6, 2020, on Ensuring Essential Medicines, Medical Countermeasures, and Critical Inputs Are Made in the United States.
– This Essential Medicines EO sought to ensure sufficient and reliable, long-term domestic production of essential medications, minimizing potential shortages by reducing our dependence on foreign manufacturers.
– The EO required federal agencies to “Buy American” by facilitating the domestic production of medicines and medical devices that the FDA determined “essential” to public health. It did so by requiring federal agencies to buy medicines and medical devices that are entirely “produced in the United States.”
– The EO also required the U.S. Trade Representative to modify our international trade agreements so that drugs deemed “essential” to public health by the FDA can no longer be purchased by federal agencies from any of the 120 countries that has a trade agreement with the U.S. that authorizes the manufacture of such “essential” drugs for the U.S. market.
– President Trump’s August 2020 Essential Medicines EO reflected critical lessons learned from the national response to the COVID19 pandemic, including the extreme national vulnerability caused by the lack of an adequate domestic manufacturing capability for critical pharmaceuticals. This vulnerability was compounded by the severely UNDERFUNDED and DEPLETED Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) left by the Obama-Biden administration. As a result, between March 2020 and January 2021, President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act over 100 times to rapidly replenish the SNS with medicines and medical equipment to fight the pandemic. As a part of this effort, large-scale and long-term government contracts were awarded to American manufacturers to produce life-saving essential medicines and medical equipment for public health emergencies. For example, Phlow Corporation in Richmond, Virginia, was awarded a $354 million contract—with an additional $458 million available for long-term stockpiling purposes—to manufacture over a dozen kinds of USA-made medicines and their precursor ingredients to treat patients hospitalized with the COVID19 virus.
– Restoring President Trump’s August 2020 Essential Medicines EO will kickstart the domestic production of lifesaving drugs.
– American doctors should never have to give a patient a drug from an unapproved facility in China or India. We can and must produce these essential medicines at home.
– A recent survey conducted by Washington University in St. Louis found that 30 percent of U.S. pharmaceutical companies utilize 50 percent or less of their facility capacity, meaning U.S. companies could already produce millions more doses of medication every year.
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