The US and China may have called a truce on trade, but Beijing has other levers to pull should febrile relations deteriorate again. That’s a potential supply-chain chokepoint that Washington has overlooked: its strategic rival’s tight grip on the raw materials needed to make an array of medicines.
The urgency of tackling pharmaceutical supplies lies at the heart of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s annual report, published last week. It proposed that Congress immediately amend a 2020 law to expand the authority of the Federal Food and Drug Administration to require pharmaceutical firms to report on the volume and origin of the building blocks of modern drugs. It also asked the regulator to ...