Why Tens of Millions Will Be Without Medicine Once Trade with China Stops
If you are against a war with China, you need to make your voice heard while you still can. Because once the bullets start flying, it will be too late.
Once a war with China starts, our current standard of living won’t just be interrupted. The truth is that our current standard of living would end. There are thousands upon thousands of products that we currently get from China that would very quickly disappear from store shelves.
They simply would not be available any longer, and Taiwan produces more of our microchips than anyone else in the world by a very wide margin. When the microchips stop flowing our whole economy will come to a crashing halt. The stakes are incredibly high, and most people don’t seem to realize this.
Nancy Pelosi knew that her visit to Taiwan would absolutely enrage the Chinese, but she did it anyway:
Pelosi and the rest of her delegation disembarked from a U.S. Air Force transport plane at Songshan Airport in downtown Taipei after the nighttime landing on a flight from Malaysia to begin a visit that risks pushing U.S.-Chinese relations to a new low. They were greeted by Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, and Sandra Oudkirk, the top U.S. representative in Taiwan.
Her arrival prompted a furious response from China at a time when international tensions are already elevated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China considers Taiwan a part of its territory and has never renounced using force to bring it under its control. The United States warned China against using the visit as a pretext for military action against Taiwan.
China is warning that there will be a military response, and the whole world is waiting to see what that will be.
If the Chinese don’t do anything more than they have already done, it will look like a big victory for Nancy Pelosi and the United States. There is no way that Xi Jinping is going to allow that to happen, and what happens next could change everything.
It is being reported that Chinese forces are gathering near the coast for a potential invasion, but I don’t think that China will launch a full-blown invasion of Taiwan quite yet.
Instead, I think that it is far more likely that China could grab a couple of the small islands right off the Chinese coast that currently belong to Taiwan.
If that happens, I believe that the Biden administration would feel compelled to respond very forcefully.
Of course, if both sides keep raising the stakes it could escalate into a full-blown war in the Pacific very rapidly. And once a conflict begins, our trading relationship with China will halt.
Are you prepared for that?
Needless to say, this would hurt us very badly in countless ways. For example, very little of our medicine is actually made here in the United States, and that is an enormous problem. According to a statement posted on the official website of U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher earlier this year, 80% of the drugs that Americans use come from overseas, and China is the largest supplier:
“The Chinese Communist Party has threatened to withhold lifesaving drugs from the U.S. once and we’d be crazy to think they won’t attempt to do so again,” said Rep. Gallagher. “Congress needs an aggressive plan to protect our critical pharmaceutical supply chains and end our reliance on China. This is a national security imperative and to many Americans, a matter of life and death.”
“The United States must end our reliance on China for lifesaving drugs and critical medical equipment,” Stefanik said. “We have become far too dependent on China’s supply chain, and their malign regime represents too great a threat to our national security for us to be at their mercy. I am proud to sponsor this legislation to equip our domestic pharmaceutical and medical manufacturers to be able to efficiently produce these items here in the United States. Through this effort, Americans can have better peace of mind regarding who they rely on for their own personal health needs,” said Conference Chair Elise Stefanik.
“Eighty percent of the drugs that Americans depend on come from overseas,” said Rep. Bill Posey. “China, whose pharmaceuticals have been subject to numerous recalls, is the largest manufacturer. As a result of this reliance, the U.S. has not produced basic medicines like in the case of penicillin since 2004.”
Are the pills that you take every day made in China? You might want to check.
And once war with China starts our supply of antibiotics will also dry up very, very rapidly.
Right now, the U.S. has virtually no capacity to manufacture antibiotics. That’s because China currently controls roughly 90% of the global supply of inputs needed to make the generic antibiotics that treat bronchitis, pneumonia, pediatric ear infections and life-threatening conditions such as sepsis.
At the peak of last year’s COVID hospitalizations in the U.S., these generic antibiotics—including azithromycin—were urgently needed to treat secondary bacterial infections. However, the U.S. faced a potential shortage, since the key materials for azithromycin and other drugs are supplied by China.
We should have never allowed ourselves to become so dependent on one of our primary global rivals. All of the experts could see a scenario like this coming, but nothing was ever done. Two years ago, there was a major article about this in the New York Times:
“If China shut the door on exports of core components to make our medicines, within months our pharmacy shelves would become bare and our health care system would cease to function,” said Rosemary Gibson, a senior adviser with the Hastings Center and an author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine.”
Read that quote again.
If this thing with Taiwan gets out of control and we go to war, our health care system “would cease to function” for the duration of such a conflict. So, what would we do then? Does anyone out there have an answer for that? If people can’t get their pills, many of them will go absolutely insane. Never has there been a population that is more dependent on pharmaceutical drugs than we are:
Almost 70% of Americans take at least one prescription medication, and more than half take at least two, according to a new study by researchers at the Mayo Clinic. The most common prescriptions are for antibiotics, antidepressants and opioid painkillers.
One-fifth of Americans are taking five or more prescription drugs, CBS Atlanta reports.
As I have been warning for years, a full-blown war with China would be absolutely unthinkable, but our leaders are provoking one anyway.
I wish that I had the words to express what I am feeling. We are so close to a truly cataclysmic conflict, and if it happens it will be far more horrifying than any Hollywood movie studio could ever imagine. {eoa}
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Michael Snyder’s book titled Living A Life That Really Matters is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.
