Kenneth Raposa
speaker
133 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Kenneth Raposa’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You got to have the generic drugs as well, because these are the drugs that we take all the time. And these are the things that are going to keep you alive during surgery, for example, like anesthesia, for example. We don't even make that in the United States. Those kind of medications are very important.
And again, what happens if, let's pretend, again, let's pretend, and these are not ridiculous assumptions. Let's pretend that you said, okay, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, that is the cure. We don't need the vaccine. Or doctors can use that. They can use that as a prophylactic to COVID vaccine. Guess where all of that is made? It is almost entirely made in India.
Now, if India also says, we want to use these things, they have a billion people. They have three times more of our population. Do you think they're going to let... A bunch of these life-saving pills disappear from their market to serve the United States.
Even if the United States was charged with paying $5 more a pill, they probably wouldn't do that because they have an old national security issue to deal with, a national health emergency, for example. So it's important to make these things here, and we do not.
Yes, that is still the domain of the US, high-end biotech. But I will tell you that the large research guys, so Pfizer or Eli Lilly, if they're trying to come up with new things like synthetic biology, for example, this would be like a robotic arm, for example, and making it work with your skin. If you're doing research in that, those guys partner with the Chinese.
Because the Chinese are just set up to do those things, okay? So China is also learning to do that, and they are going to be leaders in that, and the Chinese government wants to be leaders in that, as I said earlier, with the Made in China 2025 policy, where they made biotech a very important part of China's growth strategy. India doesn't have anything like that.
India is more involved in the generic space, right? But China is involved in boom. China's a beast, man. If China sets out to do something, they get it done. You guys are no joke. And if they say they want to be leaders in something, they tend to be leaders in it. They get there. They have not failed yet.
Well, I will say it's getting better insofar as now it's a conversation whereas before it never was. Okay. So, and it's only been a conversation in my view, maybe the last four years, right? Because COVID really hit in 2020, 2021, right? That's where it really became a conversation. So today you had Trump saying, I want to bring the pharmaceutical supply chain home.
I want to make more generic drugs. He didn't say generic drugs. He said, I want to make more pharmaceuticals at home. What? We can obviously assume that that means generic, considering most of the drugs that Americans consume, including some basic things like a saline drip in the hospital, it's imported.
We assume that he's not just talking about the branded drugs, because a lot of those drugs are already made in the United States, or again, contract manufactured in Europe and Ireland in particular. So yes, it is a topic of discussion. It is something that you hear more about on Capitol Hill. You have the President of the United States talking about doing it, right?
Making it so that you could do those things there. But again, like manufacturing anything else, you have to be incentivized. And when you're making something that is low cost, like a generic drug that people take every day, How can you make it cost effective for a lab to produce that in the United States and not go broke?
Or not need the US government to give them a check of $100,000 a month in order to do it. So there's policies in place to make sure that can happen. None of those have become law yet, but wheels are in motion. It is a topic of discussion, right?
But again, you have to make it so that those key drugs, those generic drugs, including those drugs that you mentioned earlier, like ADHD medication and others that are in constant short supply in this country, like penicillin that are not made here, for the most part, you can do it here and you can make some money or at least not lose money.
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