Thursday on Fox News, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) urged viewers to take into account the threat the United States faces from China exposed by the outbreak of the coronavirus.
Rubio said China’s struggles with the virus showed how reliant upon China the United States is and that as of now, there are many uncertainties for our health care because of it.
“The truth is we don’t know the actual complete number,” he said. “Here’s what we do know. About 80 percent of the active ingredients — you know, the different components of a drug — about 80 percent of those come from abroad, and the overwhelming majority of that 80 percent are manufactured in China. So the drug may ultimately be assembled here, but all the components of it, we rely on China for it. So, just as an example, a few years ago, there was an explosion at a laboratory in China, and it disrupted the global supply of certain antibiotics.”
“So these are not just COVID-19 — you know, coronavirus drugs we’re talking about here,” Rubio continued. “We’re talking about things people use on a daily basis, especially generics. And that is because we allowed offshoring. For years, we know the market basically said well, it’s cheaper to make it over there — let’s make it over there. It’s more profitable for the companies. So not only did we lose those jobs in the United States, we lost this capacity. And now, we don’t know if there are going to be shortages. We anticipate there will be in certain drugs because those factories have been shut down because of the virus.”
The Florida Republican also criticized China’s rhetoric in the wake of the outbreak, noting it touted United States dependency on the communist nation.
“Their official newspaper, The Communist Party, wrote an op-ed basically mocking the United States, saying you should be thanking us,” he added. “You should be apologizing to us. If we cut you off from your drugs, you guys would fall off the cliff and go into some inferno — I forgot the language they used now — and they actually singled out Florida as part of it. So what it tells you is that they realize that in a moment of crisis — let’s say the U.S. and China have a showdown over something and they can threaten to cut us off of our pharmaceutical supplies. They could trigger a domestic problem here that would make it difficult for us to confront them. It’s a tremendous amount of leverage. So we need to invest and make available investments, and flow investments into rebuilding that capacity in places where we have critical shortages — not just pharmaceuticals but rare-earth minerals all across the board.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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