Health expert, Rosemary Gibson, author of “China RX: Exposing the Risks for America’s Dependence on China for Medicine”gives a startling account of the national security threat we face getting all of our drugs from China. And policy director of League of Fans, Ken Reed, tells us inspiring stories of people, who are trying to reform the world of sports.
Miscarriage of American Justice
September 1, 2018
Corporations Are Not People, My Friend
September 15, 2018
Rosemary Gibson is an award-winning author, inspirational speaker, and advisor to organizations that advance the public’s interest in health care. Ms. Gibson serves as Senior Advisor at The Hastings Center, which is the world’s first bioethics research institute, and she is an editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association. A national authority on health care reform, Medicare, patient safety and overtreatment in medicine, Rosemary Gibson has authored many critically acclaimed books , including the one we’re going to talk about today. It’s entitled “China Rx: Exposing the Risks for America’s Dependence on China for Medicine.”
“There was country of origin labeling legislation put forward about ten years ago, but it was immediately killed. And when I asked an industry person to describe why that happened, this person said, “Well, the industry probably thought it wouldn’t be good for their customers to know where their medicines are being made.” And that’s because in a poll from the Pew Trust, only 6% of Americans trust medicines made in China. So, companies have good reason to hide it.” Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risk of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine.”
Ken Reed is the Sports Policy Director for League of Fans, a sports reform organization founded by Ralph Nader and based in Washington, D.C. He writes position papers, columns, and a blog on the biggest and most important issues in sports today. He is the editor of a new book entitled, “The Sports Reformers,”which is a collection of short interviews with current and former athletes, doctors, lawyers, politicians, consumer watchdogs, former athletic administrators, research scientists, civil rights activists, professors, fans and parents — who are working to enhance the positives and lessen the negatives in sports.
“There are some schools that are being built now without gyms. Physical education isn’t even required in a lot of schools. It’s not only hurting the physical health of our kids, but there is plenty of research shows that behavioral problems go up when physical activity goes down. And also on the positive side of physical activity, the more active kids are cardio-vascularly, the better they do on academic tests. Because physical activity actually grows brain cells.” Ken Reed, Policy Director of League of Fans
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10 Comments
I’m with Steve re Nike. I have no sudden urge to respect this company regardless of its positive commercials with Colin Kaepernick. I’m very happy for Kap that he’s (hopefully) getting some income to take care of himself (Nike can certainly afford to pay him handsomely), but as Steve said Nike has a long history of profiting from overseas slave labor. The company owns no manufacturing; they’re just a logo. Nike is merely capitalizing on Kap’s popularity, and when they can no longer profit from him they’ll kick him to the curb. Because that’s what capitalists do.
If Nike was going to do something more meaningful, they could have outright hired Kap for a position of his choosing or even creation. As I stated before, they are certainly capable of paying him a lot of money. If Nike can charge three figures for cheap, sweatshop sneakers for god’s sake, it can pay Kap seven figures per year for at least 3 years. Easily.
On hospitals now wanting to embark on making their own medicines in order to avoid the poor quality of Chinese meds, that’s a diversion. They’ll still charge an arm and a leg for alleged better quality, and a price that patients still can’t afford to begin with. It’s single-payer or die.
Ralph this is a very disturbing interview about medicines! I’m just shaking my head in disgust. One of your best interviews! Why am I not hearing this in our media?
Russia didn’t hack anything. Get informed or stay on vacation, David. Shame on you for peddling this trash on Ralph’s show. The people who hacked our elections (as in, the decade-old extremely vulnerable electronic voting and counting machines running proprietary code) are the political operators who committed election fraud in Hillary Clinton’s favor during the Democratic Primary and Donald Trump”s favor during the General election, and considering most machines require physical access it’s unlikely that the hackers were Russian. It’s time to get one of the many (progressive!) whistleblowers from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity on the radio show to put an end to this propaganda.
Afdal, I notice you comment regularly and appreciate that but please give us your last name or ‘a” last name. Ralph is reluctant to respond to people who don’t give their full names. Thanks.
Hi, I used to download these podcasts all the time but now when I click ‘download’ it streams it and does not download it onto my device. I’ve tried my mobile device and laptop.
Thanks for all you do!
Traver
Hi Ralph,
I met you on The Nation Cruise out of Ft. Lauderdale in December, 2015. I think you are a wonderful human being.
Just recently found your website and have been listening to the discussions. The level of discussion and your thoughtful,
no-pulled-punches questions and always insightful comments are a delight to me. I feel starved for pithy conversation among my friends who don’t often want to talk about anything going on.
This interview about RX in China is scary beyond words. How many times have I had to return a Chinese made product because of the terrible chemical smell it gave off? Too many. And the quality is often poor, the thing breaks easily and what are you going to do… return it to China? I had never considered that the drugs we import from China might be contaminated with carcinogens. One more thing to worry about in a long and growing list. Man’s inhumanity to man.
Thank you for making all of this information available, with so many suggestions about what to do about the things that are f***d up. Carry on!
Sincerely,
Vickie Patik
China’s confidence DESTROYED by VACCINE Scandal!
authored by ADVChina
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzXswoAUi0U
Hi Ralph,
I love your show. However, regarding “China rx”, I’m concerned over “China” again becoming our go to whipping dog. It has long been fashionable to demonize “China” and it is becoming increasingly so as “China” rises economically. Therefore, I think we need to be a little more precise in our terminology, instead of always blaming “China”, we should instead blame the “Chinese government” or “China’s neo-liberal capitalists” or the “Chinese pharmaceutical industry”, or depending on the subject, “China’s state-run industries” or “the Chinese military” for example.
China is a huge nation with nearly 1.4 billion people, about 20 percent of the world’s population. When we say “China,” we are pointing our fingers at all these people. Furthermore, if you have a serious look at China’s pharmaceutical industry, you will see that the global pharmaceutical industry is the pillar of China’s industry, without the multi-nationals China’s industry would not amount to a hill of beans. This is so in many Chinese industries, not just pharmaceuticals.
Thanks,
Robert Saiget
Mr. Nader,
Thank you for a great show highlighting the corrupt corporate power by US pharmaceutical companies. I find it both shocking and frightening that China has the potential power to medicate and physiologically influence the health of America.
I was directly impacted recently when my seasonal allergy prescription was recalled as a hypertension prescription had been improperly labeled and sent out as the allergy medication. Frightening!
We need to wake up, far reaching negative consequences await if this is the new norm.
Question: is there a URL at this site that lists all these interesting books in an easy to read list along with the author and the date they were on the show ?? Thank you ! 🙂