Dig a little deeper, and the original statistic looks even more spurious. Grassley’s figure comes from a 2016 Government Accountability Office study. Yet that report only states that “80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients are manufactured in registered establishments in more than 150 countries.”
And even that figure is far from rock solid. That’s because the GAO report misused data from the FDA. By the FDA’s own admission, it doesn’t monitor “what portion of U.S. drug consumption is dependent on APIs from China or India, or another country.”
The FDA does have some data on API manufacturing facilities around the world. And according to a recent report that examined the facilities that supply APIs for drugs sold in America, only 13% are in China and an additional 18% are in India. Meanwhile, 28% of API facilities are in the United States.
The report goes on to note that, among the 370 drugs on the World Health Organization’s essential medicines list, only three contain APIs sourced entirely from China.
The claim that 80% of America’s drugs come from China doesn’t hold. Our medicines originate from a diverse global supply chain that includes more than 150 countries.
According to White House adviser Peter Navarro, an executive order requiring federal agencies to source medical goods exclusively from domestic manufacturers could be imminent. As he put it in an interview in early May, “‘Buy American’ is going to be the law of the land, I believe, soon at HHS, DOD, the Veterans administration.”
