May 14, 2026

China’s Pharmaceutical Weapon

By: Jennifer Hendrixson White

This article was originally published in The National Interest.

This week’s Donald Trump–Xi Jinping summit in Beijing will not lack for contested business. Iran, Taiwan, AI, tariffs, and critical minerals will each compete for time on the agenda, and each will dominate the post-summit coverage. One item less likely to get airtime, however, is one with a direct impact on American lives: the dependence of the US pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector on Chinese inputs, and the leverage that dependence already hands Beijing.

Until SAPIR is extended to biologically derived drugs, until the FDA clears the bovine pathway, and until at least one American-owned heparin manufacturer operates on US soil, every dialysis shift in this country proceeds on the assumption that Beijing will not exercise leverage it already holds.

Heparin is the cleanest illustration. The drug is the blood thinner of record across American medicine—present in nearly every hemodialysis session, every major cardiac procedure, the standard treatment for deep-vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, and routine ICU protocols. Most of the US dialysis population—roughly 550,000 patients—have no clinical substitute available to them. The raw material is porcine intestinal mucosa, collected from thousands of small village workshops concentrated in China’s Shandong Province.

Read the full article in The National Interest.

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