Missouri’s senators should protect us from an alarming Chinese threat | Opinion

Missouri’s U.S. Senators — Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt — are two of the biggest China hawks in all of Congress.

Hawley has rightly called the communist-run nation “the most significant threat of the 21st century,” and has introduced legislation to crack down on Chinese industrial espionage and ban Chinese firms from acquiring U.S. research on sensitive technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Schmitt, meanwhile, has warned that the Chinese Communist Party is bent on “world domination” and is actively preparing for a potential war — citing its fivefold increase in military spending over the past decade and its intensifying espionage campaign against the U.S. government and businesses.

They’re not exaggerating. China poses an almost existential threat to America’s economic and military power. And that’s why a new White House proposal — though well-intentioned — is so alarming. It would gut America’s biotech industry, which is essential for our national security, and pave the way for China’s continued rise.

Missouri’s senators could do their constituents — and all Americans — a great service by encouraging the White House to go back to the drawing board.

The White House’s “most favored nation” drug pricing proposal would potentially tie U.S. drug prices to those paid in foreign countries such as Germany or Canada. For decades, these countries have imposed strict price controls on medicines — effectively shifting the burden of funding global drug research and development onto American patients, businesses and taxpayers.

That’s unfair, of course. The White House is rightly outraged — and should demand that our allies stop shirking their obligations to contribute towards medical innovation.

Copying those countries’ price controls, though, would all but wipe out America’s world-leading biotech industry. The former head of President Donald Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers has calculated that such price controls would reduce research and development spending by up to 60%, thus preventing the development of hundreds of new medicines. The number of new drugs developed by small biotech companies would fall by 90% or more.

Nothing would make Chinese communist leadership happier.

For more than a decade, Beijing has sought to dominate the global biotech industry. And while America still maintains a lead, China is catching up quickly. The combined market value of Chinese biotech firms has increased 100-fold since 2016, and those firms have gone from sponsoring just 3% of global clinical trials in 2013 to 28% in 2023, according to a recent report commissioned by the Senate.

If China ultimately overtakes America in biotech, the Chinese Communist Party would undoubtedly weaponize that advantage. As the Senate-commissioned report noted, the party — through its Military-Civil Fusion Policy — is already funneling state-directed funding into gene editing and AI-powered drug discovery that could have applications in biological warfare.

If we cripple our own biotech sector with price controls while Beijing accelerates, we wouldn’t just lose an economic race. We’d surrender the ability to produce critical medicines and defend against biological attacks.

Sens. Hawley and Schmitt understand the China threat better than most. They should speak out now — before the White House makes a mistake we can’t reverse. Ending foreign freeloading on American research is a worthy goal. But it shouldn’t come at the expense of a domestic industry that’s critical to our economic and national security.