Trivia question: What do Botox, Ozempic knockoff Mounjaro, and the cancer drug Keytruda all have in common?
They were all partly developed using clinical trial data from China. Specifically, from Chinese military hospitals. And, in a bunch of cases, from Xinjiang. That’s the place where the CCP has locked more than a million ethnic Uyghurs in concentration camps.
The House Select Committee on the CCP just sent letters to five major drugmakers—AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer—demanding answers about their clinical trials in China. The numbers, pulled straight from ClinicalTrials.gov, are unnerving. Merck alone ran at least 40 trials at PRC military medical centers and 31 more in Xinjiang. AbbVie: 17 Xinjiang trials, 16 at military hospitals. Similar story with Pfizer, Eli Lilly and BMS.
Is this a problem? Well, Committee Chairman and Congressman John Moolenaar said that “data developed through clinical trials at those hospitals could fuel the CCP’s military biotechnology research.”
But let’s say you don’t care about the CCP’s bioweapons program. Maybe you care about ethics?
Xinjiang is where the CCP is running a genocide against Uyghur Muslims. So when a drug trial recruits “volunteers” from inside that system, the word “voluntary” is probably a euphemism. China’s trial system enrolls patients three to five times faster than America’s. That sounds efficient until you ask why. Getting meaningful informed consent tends to slow things down. Forced labor camps tend not to have that problem.
Hellbound and Down 