A group of House lawmakers has urgently called upon the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to investigate American biopharmaceutical companies that conducted clinical trials in Xinjiang, China, where millions of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have faced persecution by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The group of bipartisan representatives, led by House Select Committee on the CCP Chairman John Moolenaar, R-Mich., and the committee’s ranking member, Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf last Monday. The letter pointed out that based on publicly available data, major U.S. biopharmaceutical companies have conducted hundreds of clinical trials in China for at least 10 years, a practice that raises three primary concerns: national security, data integrity, and human rights violations.
First, most of these clinical trials involved at least one entity associated with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). For example, the lawmakers wrote that one American biopharmaceutical company conducted a cancer therapeutic clinical trial at the 307 Hospital, controlled and operated by the PLA’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS). Notably, the U.S. government has blacklisted AMMS on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List due to national security concerns.
The lawmakers are deeply concerned that the involvement of PLA entities in clinical trials poses a significant risk of either “critical Intellectual Property (IP) being transferred to the PLA or being co-opted under the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC).” Essentially, these U.S. companies have undermined their own competitiveness and endangered national security by partnering with the PLA-affiliated entities.
