Due to the recent port strikes, the proprietors of what are shaping up to be the most profitable drugs in world history, Ozempic and other semaglutide pharmaceutical products, are having a hell of a time getting their constituent parts into the country and into their cash cows’ arms.
A silver lining to the debacle, perhaps.
Related: Doctor Warns of ANOTHER 'Alarming' Side Effect of 'Miracle' Weight Loss Drug
Via CNBC (emphasis added):
As a port strike stretching from New England to Texas halted nearly half of all trade coming into the U.S., customs data shows that critical medical devices and drug components for the booming, expensive weight-loss and diabetes drugs from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly — Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound — are among the trade casualties in the ILA union port work stoppage…
“Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are both heavily reliant on the Port of Norfolk,” said William George, director of research at ImportGenius, which tracks the customs data.
In the past year, Novo Nordisk has imported through Norfolk 419 twenty-foot equivalent unit, or TEU, containers worth of pharmaceuticals and injection devices that contain semaglutide, a compound in its branded weight-loss drugs, according to George. “Novo fine syringes commonly used for insulin injections come into the U.S. by ocean freight as well,” he said.
Novo Nordisk has raked in nearly $50 billion in sales from Wegovy and Ozempic, with most of that revenue coming from the U.S., its CEO said in recent testimony before the U.S. Senate.
It seems to me that two of the central lessons of the pandemic — both related to this unfolding Ozempic crisis, if we may call it that — have not been sufficiently heeded.
The first ignored lesson is the desperate need for a healthy distrust that whatever the pharmaceutical industry offers as a purported solution to any given public health threat — mRNA injections in the context of COVID-19 or Ozempic and related drugs in the context of rampant obesity — is probably intended to pad their bottom line and not necessarily fix the problem in the most cost-effective or plain effective manner. At best, the efficacy of their product is an ancillary public benefit next to the private primary goal of generating revenue. At worst, they give you turbo-cancer and make even more money for themselves on the back end off the backs of Americans even sicker than they were before.
Related: Are Cheerios Chemically Castrating the American Public?
The second ignored lesson is that depending on just-in-time delivery using internationalized supply chains in the Brave New Neoliberal World is forever flirting with economic catastrophe.
Continuing:
An Eli Lilly spokesperson said the company actively works to reduce exposure to risks inherent in managing a global supply chain. “We work with various partners and have multiple contingencies in place to ensure a reliable supply of our medicines,” the spokesperson said…
Noushin Shamsili, CEO and president of Nuco Logistics, which specializes in pharmaceutical imports and exports, told CNBC on Monday that the strike comes at a critical time for inventory replenishment for the drug sector. “Almost all of this industry is just on time,” said Shamsili. “Raw materials are being brought in to complete drug manufacturing.”
Approximately 48% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, used in the U.S. are imported from India. Without these APIs, medications cannot be produced. APIs are also manufactured in Europe, and the U.S. points of entry for those are the East Coast ports.
What a sick, sordid state of affairs: 48% of the pharmaceutical industry’s ingredients that end up in Americans’ bodies are sourced from a Third World country with notoriously lax quality standards, almost all of which are surely produced using what amounts to de facto slave labor so that multinational corporations like Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, et al. can save an extra penny for their shareholders while bleeding their customers in the West dry.
