BioSecure Act Falters?

 by Derek Lowe

In our last exciting installment, the BioSecure Act (which would prevent Federal agencies from doing business with a number of Chinese biopharma service companies) had passed in the House of Representatives and moved on to the Senate. And there it has run into some dead ends. The latest news is that the bill's language was not included in a big must-pass defense omnibus bill (the US National Defense Authorization Act), which is the route that many thought it could take to becoming law. And this is after reports that attempts at compromise language to get it through had been going on. It had definitely been diluted along the way even to get to this point, with longer timelines, possible waivers, and a statement that Medicare reimbursement would not qualify as doing business with a Chinese firm for the purposes of the law. Shares of WuXi and other companies jumped sharply on the news, and analysts seem to think that the bill is likely not going to make it through at all this year. Probably the only chance is if it makes it in some form into a continuing resolution on spending, and Politico says that the Speaker of the House still wants to get something like this done.

But if that doesn't happen, well, the whole process will have to start again in the next Congress. You can look at that from several perspectives: one might be that the new administration might be interested in the profitable angle of not introducing such provisions at all while not getting the government involved in more regulations. But then you have rhetoric from their own proposed Cabinet appointees that makes it sound like they'd like to hammer the evil drug companies to strike some populist poses as well. And you have the Chinese political angle, too - a revived BioSecure Act could be (or again be) dressed up in red, white, and blue as a national security issue. There's also the way that it's going to be difficult to get a lot of things through the House of Representatives at all for the next two years - it's been lost in all the huge amounts of noise over Trump's re-election, but the Republican majority in the House actually narrowed, and they already had plenty of problems getting anything done before that. It's true that some of the most obstructionist members are no longer there, but the margin of error is very small indeed.

If some last-minute compromise isn't reached in this session, my thinking is that we're probably going to see so much chaotic stuff in the next Congress that the BioSecure Act (or its successor) will be outshouted by all kinds of other concerns. There's always the chance this something like it will catch the fancy of people high up in the new administration and the whole thing will come roaring back to life, so you can't rule anything out. But if I had to bet, I would bet that this is going to evaporate.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biosecure-act-falters