What is the argument for protecting struggling American biotech companies from “China’s surging biotech sector”?
There is none, say large drugmakers like Pfizer and AstraZeneca (“U.S. Drugmakers Warn White House of Chaos as Trump Weighs Curbs on China,” The New York Times, September 10, 2025).
Only so much
“There is only so much you can do to slow down China,” explains Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer. One of the things you cannot do is issue an executive order to impede PRC medicines from flowing into the United States. A draft of such an executive order has been making the rounds as the White House invites comment.
The Trump administration has been discussing severe restrictions on medicines from China that, if enacted, could upend the American pharmaceutical industry and availability of everything from generic drugs to cutting-edge treatments.
At the heart of the possible clampdown is a drafted executive order that threatens to cut off the pipeline of Chinese-invented experimental treatments. Major pharmaceutical companies have been buying the rights to drugs created in China for cancer, obesity, heart disease and Crohn’s disease….
Prominent investors and corporate executives with close ties to the White House, including the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the Koch family and staff at the investment firm run by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, have argued for a decisive crackdown against what they view as an existential threat by China to U.S. biotechnology….
On the other side are the world’s largest drugmakers, including Pfizer and AstraZeneca. In the last few years, they have been on a shopping spree in China for low-priced experimental drugs, spurning smaller American biotech companies that are developing similar medicines.
One worry is that “the proposed crackdown could reduce or even eliminate the availability of promising treatments invented in China.” But “American patients could also be denied new cures if China’s rise cripples the U.S. biotech industry”; and expansion of drug manufacturing in the United States would help prevent shortages if, say, another pandemic “prompts China to curtail exports.”
War with China might also “prompt China to curtail exports.”
Patent plundering
Among the concerns of the investors who favor a crackdown on Chinese biotech is “a pattern in which Chinese drug developers copy early-stage American biotech discoveries described in U.S. patent filings, then race to start and enroll their own human safety studies before their U.S. counterparts can legally act.”
Investors in American biotechnology feel that more should be done to slow down China in the area of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology than Pfizer’s Bourla feels should be done. By itself, a company’s desire to face less domestic or foreign competition does not justify protectionist measures. But we are talking about how best to defend ourselves from and weaken an outsized and growing threat to the United States and many other countries.
