China made the world’s medical supplies
Then the coronavirus hit...
Have we learned our lesson
About Made in China products?
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell.
China controls the global medical supply chain.
That’s not too good in the event of a pandemic. Kind of a problem.
China covered up the coronavirus to hoard medical supplies.
The Chinese government told Western companies like 3M,
that were making N95 masks in China, that they were no longer allowed to export them.
The Chinese Communist Party even threatened to withhold life saving medicine
if the US kept asking questions about the origins of the coronavirus.
If only these critical medical supplies weren’t all made in China. If only someone tried to warn
us. Well, someone did. Mike Bowen, co-founder of the medical supply company Prestige Ameritech.
For 15 years he tried to tell anyone who would listen, the enormous national security
disaster the United States was facing. But four different US administrations wouldn’t
listen. And if you think we’ve learned our lesson after the coronavirus pandemic, you’d be wrong.
The US is making the same mistakes all over again. And it’s not just a problem with Made
in China masks. It’s a problem with Made in China everything. Joining me now is Mike Bowen.
​​ Thanks for joining us, Mike.
Thank you. My pleasure.
I can tell right off the bat, this is going to be one of those interviews that makes me angry. So
the coronavirus pandemic definitely exposed a lot of the fault lines in American society.
But I think one thing that's getting lost now is just how unprepared the US was for a
sudden demand in PPEs, things like the N95 mask. What happened in the early days of the pandemic?
Well, in January I started seeing a lot of chatter, I'm getting emails from
around the world, I'm getting emails from DHS, somebody at the border emailed me and said,
"Do you make respirators in the US?" And I said, "Yeah." "Can you make a lot of them?" I said,
"Yeah." I said, "Why?" "Well we think this could be a problem." And I said, "Okay,
tell me as one American to another, like a real problem?" And he said, "Yeah, yeah,
I do." So I was getting a lot of stuff like that. So I contracted Rick Bright,
who I'd been in contact with for a couple of years, with HHS and said, "Hey, this is going
to be bad. I think we're going to be in trouble." And then right after that, all hell broke loose.
And so for 15 years, you've been trying to warn the country that
we have a serious mask shortage. China controls everything. Why did no one listen?
I can't really figure that out. I talked to everybody,
I talked to people in government, politicians, I talked to hospital administrators, hospital group
purchasing organizations and they either didn't believe it or didn't want to believe it. And
it was on the news every time there was a flu or whatever, I would be interviewed. And I would say,
"Okay, yeah, I'm selling a lot of masks. That's the story you want. But here's the real story
is that China and other countries control the US mask supply. If there's a pandemic,
those supplies will be diverted to their citizens and our healthcare workers and patients
will be unprotected. This is a national security problem that we need to fix. Doesn't cost much to
fix. The whole market is only $150 million. Let's fix it." And I couldn't get anyone to take action.
This is something you've been screaming into the void, for four US government administrations,
Bush, Obama, Trump, now Biden. How did China end up dominating the
global medical supply chain? Didn't anyone think that was a bad idea?
Low prices. And you have to understand that hospitals, America's hospitals,
belong to group purchasing organizations, they call them GPOs and
America's hospitals don't make buying decisions on their own. They don't negotiate on their own.
They join a thousand other hospitals where the GPO and the GPO will send out a bid for instance,
masks or respirators. And so it's an all or nothing proposition. The way you win the bids
is to have the lowest price. The way you have the lowest price is to make products in China.
And that's because China being a state controlled economy,
they're purposefully putting out things below market cost, correct?
That's the way it seems. I know for a fact that
Chinese masks that are being sold here to distributors for a penny-
A penny.
Cannot be made for, yeah, a penny, the cost is way higher than that. So they're being subsidized. So
it must be by the Chinese government. And for what reason, maybe to control the PPE supply of
the world, it's not just the USA. I don't have international business. The reason I don't have
international business because China owns the market. And I've had hundreds of distributors
from around the world call me in the past and say, "We'd like to sell your masks," until I
give them my price. And they say, "Well, we have to stay with the Chinese masks."
Certainly if they're charging a penny, the Chinese government is not interested in making money,
but for comparison, how much do your masks cost? If China is selling them for a penny,
what does Prestige Ameritech sell them for?
About a dime. So you can buy two masks-
A dime.
Yeah, a dime. It's a class two medical device. You can buy two of them for less than the price of
the gumball. The penny price is like, well, let's just put it in other terms,
let's say that Russia introduced a car here and that car cost a hundred dollars.
Okay, We all know that they can't do that. Even non-business people know that that's not
right. Well, what's happening here? You can't sell a mask for a penny.
But so the difference between 5 cents and a penny,
we are sacrificing our national security and the lives of Americans for pennies.
For a very small amount of money. The entire US mask supply, before COVID, I don't know what
it's going to be after COVID, maybe bigger, was $150 million with an M, the whole market. There
are 6,000 hospitals, divide a million by 6,000, that's how much it would cost each hospital to buy
masks. Okay, now let's say that my mask costs 30% less, or sorry, 30% more than
the masks. It's not a big problem. It's the tiny, teeny little, hospitals are spending more on-
Surgeries.
Diapers. Yeah, they're spending more on all kinds of things than they are
on masks. Masks are a very small expense and yet, because they want to save pennies,
the hospitals and the American made mass makers who went to China to
serve the hospitals, have put the US at a severe national security problem.
I mean, I just remember at the start of the pandemic, the panic over mask, what a political
issue it was, the government telling Average Americans, "Don't wear masks. We need to save them
for the frontline medical workers." And all of this for like the difference between, for pennies.
Yeah. Yeah. It was a very strange thing to watch, especially as someone who sells a product that
nobody really thinks about during peacetime. I mean, my phones don't ring during peacetime. And
a year ago I was getting a phone call a minute and an email every 30 seconds.
Well, has the coronavirus pandemic changed anything?
Surely people are paying attention to the issue now.
I would like to say that that's true. I thought that was true after H1N1 10 years ago.
The swine flu.
And when, again, again, I'd been telling the message for three or four years when H1N1 hit
and I thought, okay, people get it now. We're going to fix this problem. No,
as soon as it ended, it went back to the same way. Although people who came to me crying, literally
some of them crying on the phone, wanting masks, we provided masks, they went back to their foreign
made masks afterwards. So we're not learning. And I fear that we're not learning this time too,
because I actually have hospital systems and GPOs right now telling me that they're going to
continue to rely on mainly on foreign made masks because they cost less. And they will supplement
that by buying, maybe 25% of American made masks. But what they don't get is that doesn't work.
This pandemic was mild, in a severe pandemic china would cut off 80% of the mask supply. So
the people who are making 20, they can't, the Americans that they're
using to have some sense of security, won't be able to make up the difference.
And when you say this pandemic was mild, you're saying like,
comparing it to a pandemic that kills two in every 10 people versus two in a hundred.
Right. Well, here's the proof of what I'm saying. We've got people out there that don't even believe
it's real. Why not? Because there are a lot of people who don't know somebody who
has died. Well in 1918, with the pandemic, everybody knew people who died. It was bad.
Let me put it this way. Let's say that we had an Ebola outbreak and there's dead people
laying in the street and people get it and they bleed out of their eyes and dying all over the
place. Would masks have become politicized? Would vaccines have become politicized?
Would states be having secret vaccinations for people who are embarrassed to get vaccinated
because their friends are going to make fun of them? No. People would have been standing in
line to get vaccinated and standing in line to get masks, instead of calling it a hoax.
And I fear that having a bunch of these, what I call the boy who cried wolf in a sense, hey, it's
going to be bad, then it's bad. Hey, it's going to be bad, it's not bad. We've been through that four
or five times, SARS, Ebola, H1N1 and now COVID, when the big one does come I think we're going to
be in big trouble because I don't think people are going to believe it until it's too late.
Well, so since the coronavirus pandemic began, American manufacturing has
stepped up. There are companies making masks.
Is this a sign that the issue has changed, or that it's been solved, that America can
kind of take away some of that control that China has over the global medical supply chain?
I don't think so because the people who went into business, the 50 or 100 people who went into
business of masks this year are all going to go out of business. In the next three or four months,
they will all be out of business. Most of them will probably be bankrupt because the peacetime
market can't support, they can't support them, there's not enough business, especially if the
government doesn't level the playing field and the Chinese are still allowed to play.
The market's going to be tiny still. Instead of eight companies trying to survive, or five or six,
there's going to be 110, that doesn't work. So no,
this is going to end. All those companies are going to go out of business. We're not going
to have giant amount of capacity. And we are at risk of having this happen all over again.
So the Chinese Communist Party is controlling America's medical supply
chain, that's a national security issue transparently, what needs to be done?
Well, you're asking a businessman a political question. I don't know. I don't know.
I see that the problem, it's a problem in our country and it's not just masks of course,
it's drugs and it's critical items that we have to have
and they control them. And the reason they control them is they bought the rights to do that.
They gave us prices we couldn't resist, those everyday low prices are going to kill us.
America can't even make aspirin anymore.
Yeah. And the list goes on. The list goes on and sometimes too, it's not just the medicine itself,
it's the ingredients that go into it. I hope that we haven't passed the point of no return,
but I think it's possible that we have. I don't know if this is a problem that can be fixed. And
for a couple of decades, we have just open the doors to Chinese manufacturing,
and we have shuttered our factories. So I don't know. Can you go back,
that's a question for the economists, I don't know.
So what's next for you and Prestige Ameritech?
Well, we're continuing to hammer on the government. I'm telling them they need a plan.
Good.
Yeah. Any plan that they have to have a secure mask supply that allows China to
sell masks at cheaper prices than Americans will fail because hospitals will buy them.
They're more concerned about saving money than they are about having a mask supply. And they
can rationalize buying foreign products. They rationalize it by saying, we're cash strapped,
or we need to save money. Here's how we can save money. But when you look at it and drill down,
they're not saving that much money. It's a 40, $50 million problem, split across 6,000 hospitals.
So horrible. Thanks for joining us, Mike. This is an important topic that people need to know about.
It is an important topic. That's why thank you for interviewing me.
And that's why I say yes to anyone who wants to, I try to get the word out.
Well, thank you. Thank you for trying to fight this fight for 15 years. I wish
somebody had listened to you.
My pleasure. American, well lives, human lives are important.
And this wasn't about me trying to make money. What salesman tells a story
it doesn't work for 13 years? I did that. I did that because it's the only story and it's true.
And you could have sold out to China yourself. You
could have moved your manufacturing over to China, made a bunch of money.
We could have started out in China, or we could have moved to Mexico. And no, we've
chosen to walk barefoot through a lot of broken glass. And we have managed to survive. We're a
small family company, it gets a lot of publicity, but we're just a small company and we're private
ownership. We don't have deep pockets. We're just out trying to do the right thing and create
jobs. We put our plant in Texas, my business partner, Dan Reese put our company in Texas,
the founder of the company because simply, because he thought it was the thing to do.
Well. I think I can speak for everyone when I say I really appreciate what you've
done and what you've been trying to do.
Well, I appreciate you helping me get the word out.
If you ever need to interview me again, give me a call.
Hopefully it won't require another horrible global pandemic.
Yeah, I agree.
Thanks Mike.
Thank you.
Believe me, we only just scratched the surface.
If you want to know how deep this rabbit hole goes, be sure to check out the hour-long
interview we did with Mike Bowen on the China Unscripted Podcast. Link is below.
Once again I’m Chris Chappell, see you next time.