Dear Sir
Alan Dowd documents some problems with China in The American Legion Magazine of December 2020, and I liberally quote from the article.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the adverse impact on the world attributable to China’s domination of the production of medicines, personal protective equipment and other medical supplies.
“Prior to COVID-19, 35.9 percent of America’s antibiotics, 49.8 percent of its medical bandages, 71.7 percent of its textile facemasks and 77.2 percent of its plastic gloves originated in China, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS).”
“American Enterprise Institute scholars Daniel Blumenthal and Nicholas Eberstadt report that China “quietly managed to buy up much of the world’s available stockpiles of such gear as N95 masks” and “procured nearly 2.5 billion pieces of anti-epidemic equipment” as COVID-19 swept the globe. President Xi Jinping’s regime hoarded and then resold the equipment at exorbitant markups – as much as 3,000 percent.”
China, a potential adversary, also controls the production of rare earth elements, which are used in the manufacture of a wide array of products, including ” cell phones, televisions, vehicle engines, computers, lasers, industrial magnets, fibre-optics, and superconductors, and they are also used in our military hardware such as ” F-35 aircraft and our M1A2 tank.”
Several friendly countries are working together to move the manufacture of critical supplies and elements away from China to facilities in Australia, Japan, South Korea, India, Europe and Latin America, but the US cannot rely on foreign manufacturers for these critical products.
We must speed up our manufacturing of these items in our country.
Donald Moskowitz
Londonderry NH