This nation seems to be in a spiral not of the President’s making, but as anyone with flight experience knows, spirals can be hard to pull up from. I have been dealing with massive migraines and body pain for a few weeks now, and as most of you know, with my cancer history that is cause for concern, and action.
The concern I have activated. It is the action that is delayed. There is a critical component missing in order to fix this problem, and that is CT Dye.
Contrast dye, indispensible to my original diagnosis of cancer, is in short supply, partially because about half of all dye comes from one factory in China affected by Covid shutdowns. How bad is the situation?
The component is a liquid called IV contrast, which contains iodine. It can be injected into a patient's bloodstream to highlight different structures on scans. It can reveal, for example, the location of a clot when someone is having a stroke.
The shortage stems from the temporary closure of GE Healthcare's manufacturing facility in Shanghai in the midst of that city's two-month "zero-Covid" lockdown. The lockdown began in early April and was mostly lifted by early June.
In a
statement, GE Healthcare said that facility is in the process of getting production back up to speed. Its output had risen to 60% of capacity by May 21, and GE expects the plant to be back to nearly 100% capacity this week. The company said it had taken additional steps to mitigate the shortage, including ramping up production at a manufacturing plant in Cork, Ireland.
So we will hopefully solve this issue soon, maybe, but who knows? I have never seen such a mess as this nation was left in. I say left in, because shortsighted fools blaming the President for the mess left behind is a dumb as blaming the blaze on the arriving firefighters. For some reason, ok, because, it is cheaper to make things elsewhere, we have abdicated half of a very critical medical infrastructure to a foreign processing plant. I would hope if we learn anything economically about this mess, it is that we as a nation need to make more things.
Anything. At least tangible and useful. We do make a lot of noise. Sadly, the noise cancelling headphones are made overseas.
As for me, I will wait my turn, and hope for the best. But this story is not really about me, as much as it is showing how a powerful nation could be brought to its knees by a foreign supply chain not working exactly perfectly. This is a situation set up many years prior, with no connection to current leadership, and is not something that can be resolved overnight.
Last month, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf told members of Congress during a hearing on the nationwide baby formula shortage that something needs to be done about US supply chains, which often rely on "large, single-source contracts."
"The [medical devices and supplies] industry has fought us tooth and nail on requiring that there be insight into their supply chains," Califf said. "We'd like to be able to stress-test and prevent these things from happening, rather than waiting until they happen and then scrambling."
Tens of thousands of people can’t wait, so going forward medical infrastructure needs to be treated less like a commodity and more like a component of national security. But first, people themselves need to be treated less like a commodity. We put a price on everything in this country, including that which should be priceless:
Human beings.
-ROC