White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro says the global coronavirus outbreak is exposing how the United States has been offshoring “far too many” products, including “essential medicines,” to China for too long.
During interviews with Fox News and Fox Business Channel, Navarro said President Trump’s administration is focused on moving supply chains to the U.S. from China, India, and Europe in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.
In the process, though, Navarro said the issue has revealed just how much of America’s “essential medicines” and pharmaceuticals have been offshored to China.
“Part of my mission on this issue … is to make sure that those supply chains are delivering what we need,” Navarro said. “And the epiphany that I’ve had is that far too many of our pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and supplies are offshore.” He added:
It’s for the same reasons we’ve offshored autos, electronics, and machine tools — you’ve got the cheap labor, you’ve got the lax environmental [regulations], and of course, you’ve got the unfair trade practices. So what we’re doing is focusing now bringing those supply chains home as quickly as possible by developing domestic production.
Navarro told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo that the Trump administration’s larger goal is a national reshoring program that brings manufacturing, production, and jobs back to the U.S. Navarro said:
What I’ve learned so far, not surprisingly, is that we’ve offshored far too much of our supply chain, not just for corona but for the essential medicines we need. Same reasons we’ve offshored a lot of our other stuff — it’s cheap labor … and most of all, unfair trade practices. A lot of it is in China, some of it’s in India, some of it’s in Europe. We’ve got to get that back onshore.
As Breitbart News reported, the U.S. currently depends on China to produce an estimated 97 percent of all antibiotics and 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients that are needed to manufacture drugs in the U.S.
America First Policies adviser Curtis Ellis in an op-ed for Breitbart News this month wrote that the globalist free trade consensus of Washington, D.C., policymakers is likely to crumble before the American public due to the outbreak of coronavirus:
If truth is the first casualty of war, globalism would be the second, and perhaps greatest, casualty in the war on the coronavirus.
Globalism presumes the free flow of people, goods, and capital.
The captains of industry and finance dream of globe-straddling corporations efficiently combining the resources of country X with the labor of country Y to serve the market of country Z, free of “restrictions imposed by individual national governments,” a fully integrated global economy replacing “nostalgic nationalism,” as Wall Street grandee and former undersecretary of state George Ball told Congress in 1967.
In Congress, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has written a letter to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) demanding hearings and legislation to end America’s reliance on China for crucial products and supplies like pharmaceuticals.
“The degree to which some of our own manufacturers rely on China to produce life-saving and life-sustaining medications is inexcusable,” Hawley wrote. “It is becoming clear to me that both oversight hearings and additional legislation are necessary to determine the extent of our reliance on Chinese production and protect our medical product supply chain.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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