President Joe Biden [Image courtesy of the White House]
The Biden administration recently announced efforts to strengthen the pharmaceutical supply chain, mitigate shortages of essential medicines, and expand domestic manufacturing.
The new efforts are part of an overall package of initiatives to boost U.S. supply chains that the White Houe announced on Nov. 27. Securing the country’s supply of medicines and lowering prices have been an important priority for Biden since he took office nearly three years go. The goal is to increase access to essential medicines and medical products.
The latest round of actions include:
- Invoking the Defense Production Act to broaden the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) authorities to enable investment in domestic manufacturing of essential medicines, medical countermeasures, and critical inputs that the president deems essential to the national defense.
- HHS will steer $35 million toward investments in domestic production of key starting materials for sterile injectable medicines.
- HHS will also designate a new supply chain resilience and shortage coordinator to support efforts to strengthen medical product and critical food supply chains — and to address related shortages. HHS intends to institutionalize this coordination to advance the department’s supply chain resilience and shortage mitigation goals over the long term.
- Releasing a Department of Defense report on pharmaceutical supply chain risks that will inform further action to reduce reliance on high-risk foreign suppliers.
- The Department of Defense (DOD) will also soon release a new report on pharmaceutical supply chain resilience aimed at reducing reliance on high-risk foreign suppliers.
- New cross-government supply chain monitoring partnerships include the Commerce Department working with HHS to assess industry and import data to help address foreign dependency vulnerabilities and points of failure for critical drugs.
- The U.S. will work with Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the World Health Organization to deepen the efforts of the Global Regulatory Working Group on Drug Shortages, currently chaired by the FDA.