The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has enabled China to corner the market on GLP-1 obesity drugs to the detriment of the safety of Americans, RX Border Defense’s Patsy Writesman told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle on Thursday during an event on the threat of China.
Writesman discussed how the FDA put many Chinese companies that produce GLP-1 drugs on a “Green List,” which means they are “not being detained at the border.” She contended that the government-created loophole to flood the market with obesity drugs creates an environment where Americans have access to drugs that may have been created under lax safety standards or lack transparency around ingredients.
“Over 50 percent of those companies [not being detained] are Chinese companies,” said Writesman, a board member of RX Border Defense, which is a nonprofit organization committed to fighting the illegal trafficking of counterfeit drugs. “Now, the FDA has high standards for the American population and the American companies, but they don’t have those same standards for what is coming across.”
WATCH the event below:
Writesman pointed out a letter from the FDA about a Chinese company called Sinopep.
“When they went in and looked, there were insects running around. There was water coming in that should not have been there. There were bacteria that should not have been there, but guess what? They are on the approved green list for coming in — and the compound area,” she said, referring to compounded GLP-1’s, which are customized, non-FDA-approved versions of obesity drugs.
Writesman called obesity drugs a “test balloon for China,” and anecdotally noted how, when she googled obesity drugs, she was targeted with nearly 30 advertisements for weight-loss drugs within the next hour.
“I am an educated consumer, particularly about this, but I could not find in the details where the drug was made, what were the ingredients of the drugs,” she said. “What I saw in the ads last night was they would talk about how the main name of the drug had been FDA approved, but these are compounding issues that are getting through, and it is extremely dangerous to us.”
Boyle pointed out more than 1,500 adverse incidents from GLP-1’s reported by the FDA, which Writesman contended could be even higher.
“We have one example of someone, a lady in Kentucky, she had only been on the drug for one month and had kidney failure. Now, let’s just take that example and say that there was a bad batch and a thousand people got that drug and had to have kidney transplants. The finger is going to be pointed back at the FDA on that, and we don’t have a thousand [kidneys],” she said. “The ads I saw last night were all about cost and all about how quickly you could get [the drug]. No doubt they were from Chinese entities, but people are not looking at the long-term cost — when individually, we or our family members are affected greatly with our health and the long-term cost of that, or deaths.”
Writesman’s fellow RX Border Defense board member and panelist, Raul Lopez, questioned why a country whose philosophy is “to take over the world” should be on an FDA green list.
“I’m shocked that there is a green list, or a green light, to a communist country,” he said. “It should be a red light.”
Former Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, who joined another panel at the event, said the concept of a list “to identify good ingredients and good actors versus bad ingredients and bad actors” is “okay” if carried out effectively, but he expressed concerns that the current green list does not meet the necessary standards.
“You have Americans getting sick and some even dying because they don’t know what they’re putting in their bodies,” he said, warning, “I think that becomes a national security issue very, very quickly.”