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The FDA’s recent actions have given Chinese manufacturers a significant advantage in the market for GLP-1 obesity medications, raising concerns about the safety of these drugs for American consumers. Patsy Writesman from RX Border Defense shared these insights with Matthew Boyle, Washington Bureau Chief for Breitbart News, during a discussion focused on the challenges posed by China.
Writesman highlighted how the FDA has placed numerous Chinese producers of GLP-1 drugs on a “Green List,” exempting them from border detentions. She argued that this government-sanctioned loophole allows a surge of obesity medications into the U.S. market that may not meet stringent safety criteria or provide clear transparency about their ingredients.
“More than half of these exempt companies are based in China,” Writesman remarked. As a board member of RX Border Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to combating the illegal distribution of fake drugs, she expressed concerns over the disparity in standards. “The FDA maintains rigorous standards for American manufacturers but seems to overlook these when it comes to imports,” she added.
Watch the full event below:
Writesman also referenced a communication from the FDA concerning a Chinese firm known as Sinopep.
Writesman pointed out a letter from the FDA about a Chinese company called Sinopep.
“When they went in and looked, there were insects running around. There was water coming in that should not have been there. There were bacteria that should not have been there, but guess what? They are on the approved green list for coming in — and the compound area,” she said, referring to compounded GLP-1’s, which are customized, non-FDA-approved versions of obesity drugs.
Writesman called obesity drugs a “test balloon for China,” and anecdotally noted how, when she googled obesity drugs, she was targeted with nearly 30 advertisements for weight-loss drugs within the next hour.
“I am an educated consumer, particularly about this, but I could not find in the details where the drug was made, what were the ingredients of the drugs,” she said. “What I saw in the ads last night was they would talk about how the main name of the drug had been FDA approved, but these are compounding issues that are getting through, and it is extremely dangerous to us.”
Boyle pointed out more than 1,500 adverse incidents from GLP-1’s reported by the FDA, which Writesman contended could be even higher.
“We have one example of someone, a lady in Kentucky, she had only been on the drug for one month and had kidney failure. Now, let’s just take that example and say that there was a bad batch and a thousand people got that drug and had to have kidney transplants. The finger is going to be pointed back at the FDA on that, and we don’t have a thousand [kidneys],” she said. “The ads I saw last night were all about cost and all about how quickly you could get [the drug]. No doubt they were from Chinese entities, but people are not looking at the long-term cost — when individually, we or our family members are affected greatly with our health and the long-term cost of that, or deaths.”
Writesman’s fellow RX Border Defense board member and panelist, Raul Lopez, questioned why a country whose philosophy is “to take over the world” should be on an FDA green list.
“I’m shocked that there is a green list, or a green light, to a communist country,” he said. “It should be a red light.”
Former Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, who joined another panel at the event, said the concept of a list “to identify good ingredients and good actors versus bad ingredients and bad actors” is “okay” if carried out effectively, but he expressed concerns that the current green list does not meet the necessary standards.
“You have Americans getting sick and some even dying because they don’t know what they’re putting in their bodies,” he said, warning, “I think that becomes a national security issue very, very quickly.”