Why You Shouldn’t Trust Anyone Who Claims 80 Percent of America’s Drugs Come From China – By Eric Boehm (Reason) / April 6 2020
A misleading statistic has made the rounds. But it’s based on a misreading of a government report that says no such thing.
While reading about the COVID-19 outbreak, you’ve probably encountered this particularly shocking statistic at one time or another: 80 percent of America’s pharmaceutical drug supply comes from China.
It’s a statistic that has made the rounds in right-wing publications for a while—offered as proof that China-heavy global supply chains are putting Americans at risk—but it has also popped up in mainstream outlets, including in pieces published in Politico and The Atlantic. Wherever it is deployed, the stat carries an unstated implication: What if China decides to cut us off in the middle of a pandemic? Could America face a dramatic shortage of key pharmaceutical drugs at the moment when we are most in need? And that distorted claim that says America has been too reliant on China has been seized by politicians like Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) as evidence that globalization has undermined America’s pandemic response.
In fact, because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not track the volume of drug imports from any foreign countries, it is impossible to say with any certainty how much of America’s pharmaceuticals come from China. Or from anywhere else.
But that has not stopped politicians and media outlets from recycling this shocking statistic. That statistic is based on an inaccurate presentation of a single government report that says no such thing—and, in fact, suggests the opposite. At very best, it omits crucial context. At worst, it simply misleads. One expert who has repeated this stat in numerous publications and in congressional testimony refuses to share her source for that shocking bit of information.
The figure, in other words, is both misleading and mistaken. And the politicians and pundits who have seized on it have done so in order to make it seem as if they know with great certainty a supposed fact that no one actually knows.
Continue to article: https://reason.com/2020/04/06/why-you-shouldnt-trust-anyone-who-claims-80-percent-of-americas-drugs-come-from-china/
