China Owns the Cure—How China Took Over the World’s Drug Supply Chain

The West is absolutely dependent on communist China for medical supplies, including drugs. Is there any way that could come back to bite us? Welcome to China Uncensored. I'm Chris Chapel. The Chinese Communist Party has seen itself as being at war with the US since the very beginning. So imagine how happy the Chinese Communist Party must feel knowing that the US depends on it for medical supplies. Yeah, that's right. This would be like a deer walking up to a Komodo dragon and saying, "Hey, could you hold my baby in your mouth real quick? You look trustworthy." If it wanted to, China could screw over the US by withholding key ingredients for treating blood pressure, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, epilepsy, depression, and more. The drugs to treat depression come from China. That's depressing. But even worse than cutting us off would be if China contaminated these ingredients with something lethal. This is the same country that has a long history of counterfeits and fakes, pumps fentinel precursors into the US, and covers up information about COVID in order to hoard medical supplies. In short, the perfect folks to rely on for critical essential medicine. You'd think that the way the CCP handled CO would have been a wake-up call for the world to stop being dependent on China for medical supplies. But instead, I guess co brain fog really was worse than we thought because things got worse with the West becoming even more reliant on China for pharmaceuticals, including the US and Europe, which is like a deer saying, "What was I thinking? Can you hold both of my babies in your mouth, Mr. Komodo Dragon? As of this recording, more than 50% of the US's most critical medical supplies, think gauzes, gowns, needles, syringes, catheterss, gloves, come from China. Chinese medical devices are getting into health systems across the US. Some with back doors built into them. Okay, let's face it. They probably all have back doors built into them. On top of that, the US can't live without China when it comes to pharmaceuticals. But on the bright side, this is where I'd mention the bright side if there was one. Good luck finding anti-depressants without Chinese ingredients. According to the US Pharmacopia, 41% of key starting materials used in US approved active pharmaceutical ingredients are sole sourced from China. As in, there are no other vendors outside of China for way too many drug ingredients. I never thought I'd say this, but we need more drug dealers. Damn you dare. Even many vitamins in the US are dependent on China. Should have known when my multivitamin boasted of having 100% of your daily vitamin B, vitamin D, and vitamin C, CP. The same goes for amino acids for livestock. You get the picture. The grim, unbelievably stupid, more confusing, and frustrating than an absack modern art picture. China has its sticky little fingers all over the US's medical industry, which somehow makes it especially funny that the CEO of the big pharma company Fizer cautioned that the US could lose its edge to China without innovation while simultaneously insisting that the US pharma industry needs to collaborate with China. Big pharma seems to have no qualms about its ties to China. In fact, Nature magazine found that between 2020 and 2025, 11 big pharma companies, including the likes of Astroenica, Eli Lily, Johnson and Johnson, and Fizer, committed around a hundred billion dollars to Chinese deals. These deals are intended to build next generation oncology, cell therapy, and AIdriven drug discovery. Meaning, they're actually trying to get more dependent on China. This would be like an alcoholic saying, "I have a problem. I know I should get into fentinil, which as a reminder of something China is pumping into the US. It's things like this that got us into the predicament we're in now. China didn't used to have this much influence over the medical industry until the mid 1990s. The West and Japan reportedly produced 90% of the world's active pharmaceutical ingredients used to create drugs. Oh, the '9s when we weren't dependent on China for critical medicine. The housing and.com bubbles hadn't burst and Jenko jeans ruled the streets. We used to be a society. But here's the catch. Making these ingredients involves toxic chemicals and risks pollution to the air, ground, and water. So rather than worry about complying with waste management and safety regulations, companies thought it was easier to simply offshore manufacturing somewhere else. And that's when China stepped in. It couldn't care less about the environment, so it built tons of massive chemical industrial parks and continues to do so. Add in cheap labor, government support, and loose regulations, it's no wonder Chinese chemical production became so cheap and easy to scale. By 2022, China's chemical industry accounted for almost half of global chemical sales, though most of it focused on basic chemicals. Let's just hope Chinese chemical plants don't explode and leave a global shortage of antibiotics or anything. Oh, wait. That happened twice in the same plant. I know. Shocking that poorly regulated Chinese workers would do something that would cause a crisis around the whole world. For their part, Western pharmaceutical companies gave China the knowhow to make generic drugs like antibiotics in exchange for access to the China market because that Komodo dragon has such a trustworthy face. As a result, according to this analysis by researchers at John's Hopkins University, US antibiotics imports increased almost 26fold from 1992 to 2024. That's absurd. I didn't even think you could physically fold something 26 times. China is now the leading originating country for antibiotic active pharmaceutical ingredients. Meanwhile, the US can't even domestically produce key antibiotics like penicellin anymore. The last US manufacturing plant capable of making penicellin stopped operations in 2004 after it was driven out of business thanks to China flooding the market with cheap alternatives. But on the bright side, sorry, I really need to stop getting your hopes up that there's a silver lining here. The US didn't just outsource its medical supplies. According to this House Oversight Committee report on Chinese political warfare, the US government regularly outsourced oversight and neglected inspections altogether. Yes, it just took China at its word. And when China refused to give its word, the US said, "Eh, good enough." It even allowed China to dictate the terms and conditions for inspections and relied on the Chinese to faithfully translate for US officials. There's been so much neglect, enough to even allow GNC, a Chinese-owned health supplements company, to infiltrate US military bases. I actually did a deep dive episode about that topic. If you want to learn more about it, then click below. I'm running a special promo right now, so you can watch it for free. So, what is the Trump administration doing about all this? Well, we're still waiting on reports on pharmaceutical imports and GNC. But aside from making tariff threats, ordering probes into pharmaceutical imports, and getting pharmaceutical companies to invest hundreds of billions into US manufacturing, the Trump administration is launching four projects aimed at revolutionizing US drug manufacturing. Don't do that. Don't give me hope. The program called Equip a Pharma is a collaboration between the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, DARPA, and the private sector, including one of Mark Cuban's companies to explore ways to make active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished medications in the US. Finally, a Cuban that wasn't brainwashed by Marxists. But the New York Times points out that the president's drug manufacturing renaissance in America is largely leaving out the production of generic medicines which account for 90% of Americans prescriptions. You know, since no one is taking name brand antibiotics that are 500% more expensive as a status symbol. The number of US generic drug factories has fallen by 27% since 2013. All that in just 12 years and more are expected to close. Yes, healthc care is so broken in the US that even the medicine is dying off. In some cases, the closed plants have been bought and revived by another drug manufacturer, but most of the shuttered factories aren't making medicines anymore. Oh, an actual bright side here. On the bright side, that means plenty of new buildings for spirit Halloweens. So far, only a handful of generic drug makers have announced plans to build factories in the US. There's just not enough incentive to do so, especially when it's just so much cheaper to do it in China. Certainly doesn't help that big pharma just keeps pumping money into the very country that's killing American manufacturing. It's so depressing. All I can do is laugh. But then I see that laughter isn't the best medicine. It's actually penicellin. And it just gets even more depressing. For the sake of our health, we need decoupling. Or as friend of the show, Cleop Pascal calls it, depariting. Because the CCP really is like a parasite living off the life force of others. If only we had done that decades ago and didn't also outsource our parasite medicine to China. And remember how I said the CCP is getting into US military bases? Well, I did an intensive deep dive episode about that, but I knew YouTube wouldn't like it, so I put it exclusively on my website. Just click the link below, enter your email address, and I'll send you the episode completely free. In fact, I got a ton of cool stuff I want to show you on my website, and you can start with that episode. Once again, I'm Chris Chapel. Thanks for watching, and click below.