No worries, Joe is on the job! During the 30 hours a week he works
Drug Shortages Approach an All-Time High, Leading to Rationing
Thousands of patients are facing delays in getting treatments for cancer and other life-threatening diseases, with drug shortages in the United States approaching record levels.
Hospitals are scouring shelves for supplies of a drug that reverses lead poisoning and for a sterile fluid needed to stop the heart for bypass surgery. Some antibiotics are still scarce following the winter flu season when doctors and patients frantically chased medicines for ailments like strep throat. Even children’s Tylenol was hard to find.
Hundreds of drugs are on the list of medications in short supply in the United States, as officials grapple with an opaque and sometimes interrupted supply chain, quality and financial issues that are leading to manufacturing shutdowns.
Anyone who voted for Biden/against Trump, well, this is what you were voting for
The shortages are so acute that they are commanding the attention of the White House and Congress, which are examining the underlying causes of the faltering generic drug market, which accounts for about 90% of domestic prescriptions.
The Biden administration has assembled a team to find long-term solutions for shoring up the pharmaceutical supply chain, at a time when the United States remains heavily reliant on medicines and drug ingredients from India and China. And in recent weeks, generic drugmakers, supply-chain experts and patient advocates have appeared before lawmakers to discuss the problems.
Oh, thank goodness, they’ve put together a team! And people are testifying! That should solve the problem. Which everyone else saw coming back in 2021. In fairness, you can’t put the main blame on Biden, it goes to China and people like Fauci for screwing around with coronaviruses. But, secondary blame goes to the Biden admin, which never took their eyes off the ball, because they never had their eyes on the ball to start with
The White House team working on the broader issue of long-standing drug supply breakdowns includes national security, economic and health officials, according to James McKinney, a spokesperson for the Food and Drug Administration. Bloomberg reported earlier on the White House involvement.
Officials have been debating possible measures like tax incentives for generic drugmakers and greater transparency around generic drug quality. The current incentives favor drugmakers with the lowest prices, which includes those that might cut corners — leading to disruptive plant shutdowns if the FDA demands a fix. (Some shortages, like those of weight-loss drugs, are the result of sky-high demand, while others have been attributed to overprescribing, including for antibiotics, or a lack of investment in potential alternatives.)
So, just a lot of yapping and political posturing. You can really look back to the lines being shut down in 2020, and even into 2021, due to COVID, and they just aren’t able to catch up, much less over-produce.