Al Jazeera, 26 February 2020
China, epicentre of the outbreak, is the world’s dominant maker of the building blocks of some of the most common drugs.
Beijing, China – “When you control the supply of medicines, you control the world.”
Those were the words of Rosemary Gibson, co-author of the book, China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine, at a United States Congressional committee hearing last July in Washington, DC.
At that session of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Gibson, who is also a senior adviser to the Hastings Center, a US-based bioethics research institute, laid out her concerns about what she described as “a really hidden and overlooked threat to our national health security, economic prosperity, and national security, and that is our dependence on China for medicine.”