... We are too dependent on drug components coming out of China right now to piss them off so much so they close the door. Unfortunately they do have us, and the rest of the world, by the balls here.
Whose fault is that. This is not a confrontation, it's an honest question. Why do we let situations like this happen? So someone saved a few bucks by relocating a factory, bully for them.
Why was there one factory in Puerto Rico that made 95% of the world's IV bags? Why did the world put itself into that position?
Calculating the savings due to economies of scale are one thing, but what does that cost? The calculations never seem to be complete, someone always leaves something out. People are shocked when, suddenly, externalities matter, as if it's the first time.
Is it sensible to let private interests solely decide matters of national importance? Optimize your business, sure, but what if your optimization puts lots of people at risk? By the time you find out what you've lost, it's too late, and the guy who made the decision cashed his bonus cheque and has moved on.
I fully hope that after we get out of this, they will be held accountable for this and directly blamed.
I hope so too but what form would that take. Were the people who fed meat to herbivores years ago held accountable for Mad Cow? If we let the cows eat grass, someone makes less money or steaks cost more. So are we still feeding meat to herbivores today? Last I heard (maybe 5 years ago) we still were, only now we have stricter rules about which animal parts are used to make the feed. I hope they're abiding by those rules. Who is watching to make sure.
We keep hearing about pressures from industry to let it police itself, get the government out of regulation, by starving government of tax funds if we need to. I hope those are good decisions. What could go wrong. Who will be held accountable if/when something does go wrong?
So far as I know we're still pumping hormones and anti-biotics into hogs and milk cows and chickens. Is that really a good idea.
I hope that chronic wasting disease that deer are getting in the north-east doesn't jump to other species. It may already be in moose though.
Everyone wants the Chinese government to come up with new market stall and wild animal rules and enforce them. Makes sense. How would other countries feel if the Chinese demanded that we alter how we run our countries? All I'm saying is that there may be some things we want them to do, so we'd better find a way to convince them, a way that actually works. Because so far nothing is working. Pathogens keep coming out of there, their own people suffer from them, but that doesn't seem like enough incentive to make them change things.
This is not promising for the human species. This is highly off-topic, I guess.
