Commentary
Communist China isn’t just trying to compete with the United States in pharmaceuticals—it’s trying to overtake us. With a drug industry backed by massive state investment and regulatory shortcuts, China has quickly emerged as a global powerhouse in drug development.
In 2024 alone, China conducted more clinical trials than the United States and is now developing almost as many new drugs as the United States is. While U.S. innovators are bogged down by bureaucratic red tape, Chinese companies are racing ahead, often with far less oversight.
China’s rise isn’t just about innovation—it’s about infiltration. Increasingly, unapproved and unregulated Chinese-made compounds—including weight-loss drugs such as glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1)—make their way into the United States through online compounding pharmacies, social media sellers, and sketchy e-commerce platforms. Many of these products evade scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), yet they’re being consumed by millions of Americans who assume that what they’re taking has been properly vetted.
This is more than a public health risk—it’s a national security threat. The Chinese regime is exploiting U.S. regulatory gaps and consumer vulnerabilities, flooding the market with untested therapies while positioning itself as the world’s next pharmaceutical superpower.
Meanwhile, U.S. manufacturers face stricter standards and longer approval timelines, creating an uneven playing field that punishes U.S. compliance and rewards Chinese circumvention.
Take knockoff weight-loss treatments. More than nine out of 10 Americans worry about what’s in these drugs and where they come from. Indeed, such compounded medicines aren’t coming from your trusted neighborhood pharmacy. They’re being manufactured with ingredients often sourced from China, with little to no transparency about what’s actually in them. No FDA approval. No clinical trials. Just chemical cocktails dressed up to look like legitimate treatments.
The FDA has already issued strong public warnings about the risks of these unapproved GLP-1 drugs being used for weight loss. In fact, the agency has gone out of its way to warn doctors, patients, and compounders that these products are neither tested nor safe. But rather than heed those warnings, some of these compounders are thumbing their noses at federal regulators, ignoring the law, and continuing to crank out untested drugs.
Fortunately, Congress is paying attention. In July, a group of 80 lawmakers sent a letter to the Trump administration demanding a crackdown on these foreign-made, non-FDA-approved knockoff drugs. They rightly warned that this shadow market not only puts Americans at risk, but also threatens to destabilize our entire pharmaceutical system.
This isn’t just about health. It’s about sovereignty and security. While U.S. companies play by the rules—undergoing rigorous testing, FDA approval, and years of research and development—Chinese labs and compounders cut corners, flood our market, and profit off Americans trying to live healthy lives.
Allowing compounders to churn out GLP-1 copycats creates a “Wild West” in our supply chain, outsourcing critical medicines and bolstering a Chinese pharmaceutical industry that aims for global dominance. That undercuts U.S. manufacturing jobs and cedes strategic advantage to a geopolitical rival.
The United States can’t afford to sleepwalk into pharmaceutical dependence. When unregulated drugs from overseas flood our market and compounders openly defy FDA warnings, it sends a dangerous message: that we’re willing to outsource public health to geopolitical rivals.
The Chinese regime understands the stakes; that’s why it’s investing billions of dollars to become the world’s medicine cabinet. Let’s recognize China’s pharmaceutical surge for what it is: a deliberate strategy to dominate the world’s medicine supply.
If we allow rogue compounders to undercut FDA standards and flood the market with unvetted weight-loss therapies, we’re not just enabling a regulatory loophole, we’re accelerating a dangerous shift in global pharmaceutical power. The United States must decide: Do we want to hand over our medicine supply to a geopolitical rival that plays by a different set of rules?
The more we tolerate this gray market, the more we erode the integrity of our pharmaceutical system and outsource our health security to a strategic competitor.We must make it absolutely clear that the United States is not open for business to unapproved drugs, whether for weight loss or any other condition—especially drugs built on foreign shortcuts and bad faith.
