I wish he would have used better examples. The antibiotics are probably the single biggest concern because those are lifesaving drugs. We don't make any of them in any significant quantity in the US. It's all offshored. If you had a major disaster with many injuries or God forbid an actual war, we'd need huge quantities of that stuff and no one's got the production lines that we could just crank up to make it.
We can't just import it from overseas either. Mexico's supply chain is so contaminated, you have no idea what you're actually getting. Back when the FDA actually did its job, inspecting the handful of foreign plants where US drugs were made was a priority, but the Mexican equivalent just isn't up to the task. The Canadians have a small fraction of our population. They couldn't substitute for us. Nor could Europe so long as they've got this war in Ukraine going on.
And that's just one class of life-saving drugs. We off-shored our national security when we allowed big business to get away with exploiting cheap Chinese labor while we demanded living wages, safe working environment, environmental protections, etc of our workers. We need to reshore this stuff, but how do you provide incentive when profit margins are low (because life-saving drugs can't be price gouged) and the capital requirements to build the facilities are high. Trump will have to tariff imports or abuse the FDA to get companies willing to make these drugs domestically.
We absolutely need our own medical industry here. It is incredibly dangerous that we don't.
In fact, all of our critical infrastructure (including medical) is offloaded to both foreign and hostile nations, and our coffers are bled dry to hell other countries and subsidize their socialist healthcare systems.
I wish he would have used better examples. The antibiotics are probably the single biggest concern because those are lifesaving drugs. We don't make any of them in any significant quantity in the US. It's all offshored. If you had a major disaster with many injuries or God forbid an actual war, we'd need huge quantities of that stuff and no one's got the production lines that we could just crank up to make it.
We can't just import it from overseas either. Mexico's supply chain is so contaminated, you have no idea what you're actually getting. Back when the FDA actually did its job, inspecting the handful of foreign plants where US drugs were made was a priority, but the Mexican equivalent just isn't up to the task. The Canadians have a small fraction of our population. They couldn't substitute for us. Nor could Europe so long as they've got this war in Ukraine going on.
And that's just one class of life-saving drugs. We off-shored our national security when we allowed big business to get away with exploiting cheap Chinese labor while we demanded living wages, safe working environment, environmental protections, etc of our workers. We need to reshore this stuff, but how do you provide incentive when profit margins are low (because life-saving drugs can't be price gouged) and the capital requirements to build the facilities are high. Trump will have to tariff imports or abuse the FDA to get companies willing to make these drugs domestically.
We absolutely need our own medical industry here. It is incredibly dangerous that we don't.
In fact, all of our critical infrastructure (including medical) is offloaded to both foreign and hostile nations, and our coffers are bled dry to hell other countries and subsidize their socialist healthcare systems.