Senators press Department of Defense on overreliance on foreign drug manufacturers

A bi­par­ti­san group of sen­a­tors on Tues­day re­leased a let­ter sent to De­fense Sec­re­tary Lloyd Austin seek­ing to build pres­sure around im­prov­ing sup­ply chain se­cu­ri­ty to min­i­mize drug short­ages, par­tic­u­lar­ly for drugs sourced en­tire­ly from for­eign coun­tries like Chi­na.

A DOD re­port, re­leased along­side the let­ter, shows that 27% of the drugs on the FDA’s es­sen­tial med­i­cines list were cat­e­go­rized by the De­fense Lo­gis­tics Agency as “Very High Risk” be­cause they are ei­ther de­pen­dent on Chi­nese man­u­fac­tur­ers us­ing Chi­nese ac­tive in­gre­di­ents or drugs of un­known sources.

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