Instead of relying on China in the event of another regional emergency, the Biden administration is letting but another factory linger that was meant to give America with vital medical supplies.
Despite the company’s pioneering in March 2022, the federal government invested nearly$ 100 million to create rubber latex gloves, which is currently sitting idle and empty.
The condition- of- the- craft shop in Baltimore County, Maryland, which was once used by Bethlehem Steel, was aiming to bring in$ 350 million in public and private purchase, create 2, 000 new jobs, and mark the return of manufacturing to Sparrows Point within a year.
However, the stock has yet to make a single gloves, the manufacturer sits unfinished, and” the authorities are distancing themselves”, according to the statement.
The company contracted to develop the mill, United Safety Technology, needs more money from the federal government, and is unable to engage with China, which under the Biden administration has become the leading provider of latex gloves.
” I think this is a national account, to be honest with you”, Dan Izhaky, chairman of United Safety Technology, said.
Despite the country’s leading two Democrat legislators asking the administration for assistance, the Biden administration has also turned its back on a roughly finished state-of-the-art rubber plant in Virginia.
The federal government provided$ 123 million to Blue Star NBR for the plant and a nearby glove-making factory during the pandemic, but CEO Scott Maier claimed he needed$ 70 million to pay for the construction of the glove factory and$ 70 million to pay for the facility because of rising inflation and rising costs of energy and building materials. In May 2023, the Biden Department of Defense ( DOD ) told him the contract was over, and Maier would have to win a new contract, or find private funding.
During the COVID pandemic, which started in Wuhan, China, and spread to the rest of the world, killing millions worldwide, American hospitals and frontline workers found themselves scrambling for masks, gloves, ventilators, and basic medical supplies. Because of the difficulty of getting the supplies they needed, many of them were produced overseas in Asia. In addition, the Strategic National Stockpile had been depleted by the Obama administration during the 2009 swine flu crisis, and never replenished.
The Trump administration launched a massive campaign to restock the nation’s supply chains, which is crucial for the production of medical supplies. The Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services were given the task of producing PPE, pharmaceutical ingredients, and other essential supplies domestically, and they were given contracts worth$ 16 billion each to companies for 87 different manufacturing projects.
However, the Biden administration has distanced itself from the projects. China, which had a small share of the rubber glove market at the start of the pandemic, is now on its way to impose itself.
As Breitbart News’s Matthew Boyle reported, since Biden took the White House in 2021, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP ) has rapidly seized market share for U. S. imports of nitrile medical gloves.
Data from the U. S. International Trade Commission ( USITC ) showed that in 2019 the U. S. relied on China for about 14.2 percent of such medical gloves. Domestic manufacturing accounted for zero percent, but other countries, such as Malaysia, Thailand, and more — nations far friendlier to the United States than China — made up 85.7 percent of imports.
However, since Biden took office,  , China increased its share of imports of medical gloves to the United States to 26.8 percent, while the other countries dropped to 73.1 percent. Two years later, in 2023, China increased its share of imports of medical gloves to the United States to 44.15 percent—while the other countries dropped to just 53.6 percent. In 2023, thanks to a program started during the pandemic under Trump but stymied under Biden, the U. S. made around 2.22 percent of medical gloves used domestically.
” At this pace, if nothing changes, the U. S. will be dependent on China for approximately 60 percent of medical gloves used domestically in 2024″, Boyle wrote.
During the pandemic, the federal government awarded six companies$ 574 million to produce the rubber gloves worn by doctors, nurses, and other technicians, and another$ 123 million for the proposed nitrile rubber factory in Virginia. United Safety Technology won a$ 96.1 million federal grant to manufacture the rubber gloves, and raised an additional$ 250 million in private investment, according to the Baltimore Banner. Only two of the six awardees are still making gloves today.
Maier claimed that the suffering is not just factory-run rubber gloves.
There are probably 50 or 60 other companies that have these facilities that are probably 80, 90 percent finished but actually are n’t producing anything, Maier told Breitbart News in an interview last month. And yet again, we must produce the essential items here in the United States, or at least possess some, to prevent a situation in which we are unable to obtain these essential items.
Maier said when they appealed to the Biden administration, their requests fell on deaf ears.
” When we talk to the administration…they say,’ Well, we want the private sector to come in.’ Well, unfortunately, when the government comes in and jumpstarts a project like this, it crowds out the private sector. And then the private sector looks in and says,’ Well, it looks like the government’s really abandoned you. They wo n’t even buy the product that’s coming out, and they’re not giving you money to finish your factory either.
Few people seem to care about subsidizing American-made gloves now that the pandemic has passed, according to Tinglong Day, a professor of operations management and business analytics at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. ” It was a feel- good story at that time”, he said.
However, Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a watchdog group that conducts research on government subsidies, claimed one thing the government could do is enforcing that federal agencies purchase American-made gloves, which would result in a small but steady supply of domestic goods.
Izhaky said he is still holding out hope, and like the rubber plant factory, it is nearly completed.
” We spent a lot of money building out the factory, retrofitting that facility”, he told the Baltimore Banner. ” The equipment is in there”.
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