Opinion: An ‘America first’ pharma supply chain sounds good. But it won’t work
With a stroke of the president’s Executive Order pen, the Trump administration awarded a $354 million, four-year contract to a new company called Phlow located inside the Beltway in late May. Its charge is to manufacture pharmaceutical ingredients and generic medicines used in treating patients hospitalized for Covid-19, ingredients that for years have been produced overseas supply chains, mainly in China and India.
On its surface, the move seems to make sense: secure domestic production capabilities for these medications to prevent shortages or disruptions in the supply chain, which may be subject to geopolitical shifts in the wind.
