Kaine introduces bill to protect US supply chain for essential drugs
On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) introduced the Protect Our Essential Medicines Act, which would require the Department of Health and Human Services to maintain a list of vital drugs whose supply could be vulnerable in the case of a future pandemic or epidemic.
Kaine told VPM News he hoped the law would safeguard against future supply chain issues and protect Americans from drug shortages.
“These drug shortages issues are becoming more and more frequent,” Kaine said. “They’re hard to predict, and all of a sudden they hit you, and it really affects operations and it affects patient care.”
As of September, there were active national shortages of nearly 280 drugs, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. Some of those include basic and life-saving medicines such as antibiotics, drugs used for chemotherapy and central nervous system stimulants used for attention and cognition.
The bipartisan legislation, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), would create an interagency task force including — among others — the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.
The task force would create two more lists in addition to the list of essential medicines. The first, which will be publicly available, identifies the top three countries that supply the U.S. with each essential drug.
“Americans deserve to know where their life-saving medicines come from. This legislation requires greater transparency in the sourcing of critical drugs, helping to protect patients and strengthen trust in our healthcare system,” Cotton said in a press statement.
The second list — which will be confidential — would track drugs produced exclusively in China. Kaine, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the legislation singles out China because of its market size and concerns about intellectual property theft.
“What we found during COVID is we were overly reliant upon China not only for production of medicine, but for just simple health care products,” Kaine said. “When you end up with a lot of your supply chain in a country of China’s size — where during a global health crisis, they’re going to need their own production capacity to meet their own citizens’ needs — you make us very vulnerable.”
The legislation is aimed at developing a better understanding of where America’s drugs are coming from and addressing an overreliance on internationally produced drugs.
Kaine also hopes it could protect against goods made in countries with lower production standards — and maybe even lead to more domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing, including in Central Virginia.
Kaine mentioned the Campus for Advanced Manufacturing of Pharmaceuticals in the United States in Petersburg, which includes Phlow, Civica Inc. and AMPAC Fine Chemicals. He said the bill will assist domestic production, which he called a “national security” issue.
Traditionally, the U.S. has seen weapons as something that should be manufactured domestically. During the pandemic, security experts began seeing health care manufacturing in the same vein.
“I view it as sort of indirectly connected to the manufacturing effort in central Virginia, and I think that manufacturing effort is going to grow and grow in the years to come,” Kaine said.
Last month, Kaine and Cotton, along with Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia) and Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Nebraska), introduced the End Drug Shortages Act, which requires drug manufacturers to notify the FDA when there is a surge in demand for a drug which could lead to a shortage.