On the recordMarch 19, 2020
we are continuing to roll out our response to the coronavirus and to this pandemic, and I want to encourage my colleagues to begin to think about how we move past this immediate crisis that we are in and begin to look toward what is going to happen in the future with our supply chains and our healthcare delivery systems. As we talk about the problems that are before us today, let us not forget that 3 months from now, 6 months from now, a year from now, we need to be looking at today and say: Here were the lessons learned, and these are the steps that we have taken to make certain that it doesn't happen again. What we have learned and what many Americans know is something that some of us started working on a couple of years back. It was looking at the fact that Americans and American drug manufacturers rely heavily on Chinese companies to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, as they are called. We also know that bad actors in China are poised to use that vulnerability as leverage and to use it as a way to disrupt and interrupt the supply chain of those active pharmaceutical ingredients coming into our country. This is an issue that we cannot wait to address. This is something we need to do right now. That is why my colleague from New Jersey, Senator Menendez, and I introduced the Securing America's Medicine Cabinet Act, or the SAM-C Act, as a way to encourage and increase American manufacturing of these active pharmaceutical ingredients.…
