Our Medicine Supply Is Sick

AND BUSINESS HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER –

Sept. 18, 2021 – Drug production moved to Asia for the same reasons that other American manufacturing did: labor was cheap, environmental regulations were weak and the continent was full of new potential customers. But drug companies had an additional incentive: Over there, F.D.A. inspectors didn’t drop in on factories unannounced.

In 2012, Heather Bresch, Mylan’s then-C.E.O. and the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin, complained at a congressional hearing that U.S.-based plants like hers got inspected every two years, but the same was not required of foreign factories. Congress responded by setting up a system in which generic drug companies paid a fee that gave the F.D.A. more resources to conduct international inspections, but by then, Mylan had already joined the offshoring trend. In 2007, it became the first American drug company to buy a publicly traded Indian company, shifting some of its production to the western city of Nashik. About 400 workers in West Virginia lost their jobs. But the production of levothyroxine, which was hard to make, remained in Morgantown.