Trump signs executive order to fill reserve with critical drugs

President Trump has signed an executive order to fill the Strategic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Reserve with critical drugs to ensure "a resilient domestic supply chain for essential medicines."

The executive order signed on Tuesday directs the Department of Health and Human Services assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response to create a list of about 26 critical drugs that are deemed "vital to national health and security, and ready the SAPIR repository to receive and maintain the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) used to make these critical drugs," according to a White House fact sheet.

Also, the order charges the official with getting a 6-month supply of the APIs for the critical drugs, "with a preference for obtaining domestically-manufactured APIs if possible, and placing them in the SAPIR."

Trump additionally told the official to make a proposal for a second SAPIR repository.

The executive order comes after National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya told Just the News, No Noise TV show last month that the U.S. has a shortage of some drugs, such as antibiotics.

"So much of our manufacturing for drugs relies on the Chinese manufacturing, on Indian manufacturing," Bhattacharya said. "And it leaves the United States in a very vulnerable place, where if you have a crisis, even when you don't have a crisis, when there's just normal demands for vital medical items, antibiotics, I already mentioned, normal saline. All of that is just normal demand.

"We are in a shortage now of some of those things, because we do not have domestic manufacturing that can respond when there is an increase in demand, as there sometimes is," he continued.