Coronavirus: White House trade adviser vows to cut reliance on foreign medical supplies

US President Donald Trump’s top trade adviser used the daily coronavirus briefing on Thursday to decry trade deals with other countries that failed to allow imports of medical supplies needed by US health authorities fighting the outbreak.

Without mentioning China specifically, Peter Navarro, the White House director of trade and manufacturing policy, applied much of the same terminology that he employed previously in defending the Trump administration’s hard-line trade stance against Beijing.

“If we learn anything from this crisis … never again should we have to depend on the rest of the world for our central medicines and countermeasures, and at the same time we will deregulate so we can get the [Food and Drug Administration] and [Environmental Protection Agency] to facilitate domestic manufacturing,” Navarro said in the coronavirus task force briefing at the White House.

Last Friday, when Trump said he would use the Defence Production Act to force companies to produce critical supplies to fight the outbreak, he named Navarro as the policy coordinator in charge of that portfolio.

Navarro added: “The key here is having advanced manufacturing on US soil that can leapfrog other countries so we don't have to worry about competing against cheap sweatshop labour, lax environmental regulations, different tax regimes, and massive subsidies of foreign governments who are actually directly attacking our industrial base.”

Chinese government subsidies have been one of the key issues that prompted the Trump administration to start a trade war with Beijing that has been running for nearly two years. The US has import tariffs of up to 25 per cent on about US$360 billion worth of Chinese imports.