Terry Glavin: The ventilators needed to survive COVID-19 are mostly made in China. Is there a lesson here?
China is the world’s major producer of ventilators and respirators and half the world’s medical masks
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There are quite a few lessons we will all just have to wait to draw from the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted last December in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The coronavirus that causes the sickness is still rampaging across the face of the Earth. The economic and geopolitical shockwaves are still shattering almost everything that was commonplace and routine and familiar from the days before the plague began.
But there is a lesson that we all should have learned quite some time ago, which is proving its merit and value now that we are being forced to learn it in the hard and horrific way that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is teaching it. It’s that thriving liberal democracies cannot coexist for long within a model of neoliberal globalization that admits into its embrace such a tyrannical state-capitalist monstrosity as the People’s Republic of China.
The arrangement would end badly. It was already putrefying long before the plague began radiating outward from the offal-strewn alleys in the wild animal section of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan’s Jianghan district, and outward across the province of Hubei, and then, for weeks, as a human-borne contagion undisclosed by the Chinese Communist Party, outward around the world.
There is a lesson that we all should have learned quite some time ago
For years, Canadian, American and European production was increasingly outsourced to Chinese sweatshops, and to vast factories untroubled by the inconvenience of proper trade unions. At the advent of the plague, the world had become dependent upon Beijing for a vast range of medicines and for the supply of exactly the kinds of medical equipment the world needs to defend itself against the sickness.
By last December, China was already the world’s major producer of the ventilators and respirators that have been found in such short supply, now that SARS-CoV-2 is burning its way across the world. Before the outbreak in Wuhan, half the world’s medical masks were already being made in China.
According to Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S. had become reliant on China for 97 per cent of its antibiotics by 2018. U.S. Commerce Department records show that China had by then captured between 70 and 95 per cent of the U.S. market for vitamin C, ibuprofen, hydrocortisone and acetaminophen.
Chinese factories had also become the United States’ main source of surgical gowns, and of the equipment that measures blood oxygen levels, and of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. After weeks of suppressing information about the nature of the outbreak, on Jan. 23 Chinese authorities locked down Wuhan and several other cities in Hubei, and from that moment on, Beijing began to enforce official and de facto bans on the export of medical equipment.
By March 15, when the European Commission finally shut down the untrammelled export of personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies, the European Union and more than 50 countries were either banning outright or imposing strict restrictions on the export of a variety of medical equipment types and PPEs, including masks, visors, hazmat suits, and gloves.
As for Canada, 10 days later Mary Ng, Minister of Small Business, Export Promotion and International Trade, was affixing her signature to a commitment to “maintaining open and connected supply chains.” The commitment was also signed by her counterparts from Australia, Brunei, Chile, Myanmar, New Zealand and Singapore.
Chinese factories had also become the United States’ main source of surgical gowns
A tiny alliance, the ministers all pledged themselves to oppose any “trade restrictive measures on essential goods, especially medical supplies.” At about the same time that Ng and the others were declaring their faith in the dead god of unrestricted trade, the Canadian firm Medicom was still producing three million medical masks a day at its Shanghai factory, but the company was prohibited from exporting masks from China to Canada.
And so it was almost poignant to see that in the $2-billion scramble Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced this week to shore up Canada’s drastic shortage of the medical gear required by hospitals across the country to cope with the COVID-19 crisis, Medicom was among the firms enlisted to the cause. Based in Pointe-Claire, Que., AMD Medicom Inc. will be opening its very first permanent factory in Canada.
Canada will be needing millions of masks, and thousands of ventilators. We will have to hunt and scour every nook and cranny of the Earth for suppliers, but the hope is that enough factories can be built or at least retooled in Canada to keep up with the demand.
It probably didn’t help that Ottawa sent 16 tonnes of gear to China back in February. That was a lot of gear — 1,101 masks, 50,118 face shields, 36,425 medical coveralls, 200,000 pairs of gloves and so on — but a drop in Beijing’s bucket. A New York Times investigation last month found that China had imported 56 million respirators and masks, just in the first week of the Wuhan shutdown.
It is not known how much of that cargo came from the massive bulk-buying campaign organized and carried out across Canada by affiliates of the United Front Work Department, the overseas propaganda and influence-peddling arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
And Canada’s predicament wasn’t much helped by the Bank of China’s donation of 30,000 masks and a variety of PPEs last week, which was touted by China’s embassy in Ottawa, and applauded in turn by our own Foreign Affairs Minister, François-Philippe Champagne. It was mostly just embarrassing. China and its various state entities are engaged in these kinds of propaganda events all over the world at the moment.
It probably didn’t help that Ottawa sent 16,000 tonnes of gear to China back in February
Meanwhile, the Americans are scrambling for gear, too, and it won’t be fun watching Canada compete in a bidding war with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. The American medical-supply cupboards are almost bare, and FEMA has been instructed to lock down all the supply it can find, anywhere in the world.
Last Sunday, a planeload of medical equipment landed at JFK airport in New York, the pandemic’s broken-hearted American epicentre. The gear came from China. The flight was the first in a month-long airlift, and it’s not expected to come close to keeping up with the demand from American hospitals. But that’s what globalization has come to. It’s not ending well.
But it’s ending.
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