Chairman Rick Scott (R-FL) of the Senate Aging Committee made a prediction during a hearing on domestic generic drug manufacturing on Wednesday, saying that his CLEAR Labels Act will become law this year. The law would require drug makers put the source of their active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs – the key active ingredients that make up the final product itself – on the label. As it is, drug companies tend to put nothing on the label, or only where the medicine was distributed and packaged. There is hope that labeling requirements would be a step toward giving U.S. generic drug manufacturers more preferential treatment, but this would require more acts of Congress, FDA action, or new rules for defense department procurement officers in charge of buying medicine for veteran hospitals, for example.
“America makes only 27 percent of the medicine it consumes, but in 2002 it was 72 percent,” Scott said in his opening remarks this week. “We have almost completely lost our ability to make generic drugs in this country. Meanwhile, manufacturers in China and India have falsified records, and they cut corners on quality. Just recently, the Chinese equivalent of FDA was caught taking bribes for drug approvals.”
Chen Shifei, former deputy director of China’s National Medical Products Administration, essentially China’s FDA, was sentenced by a Shanghai court in April to 14 years in prison for bribery. The court said that from 2003–2024, Chen used his position as a drug regulator to help labs obtain permits and licenses and received more than 46.43 million yuan (~$6.8 million) in money and property in return.
Yu Wenming, former head of the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, was sentenced on August 21, 2026 to 15 years for accepting more than 63.44 million yuan (~$9.5 million) in bribes, according to China’s anti-corruption messaging commission — the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. The court specifically found that Yu helped people with drug-registration approvals. Were they safe, and ready for market? Who knows?
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