A S U P P LY CHAIN REACTION Richmond and Petersburg host a new pharmaceutical cluster making essential medicines with innovative techniques
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he COVID-19 pandemic has brought shortages of all kinds to the U.S. economy, from cream cheese and toilet paper to N95 masks and consumer electronics. The supply chain went from a machine working in the background to a catch-all issue. Stores can’t restock fast enough? It’s the supply chain. Will delivery take six weeks? Supply chain. Most critically, in the middle of a public health emergency, a long-simmering problem was exposed: The U.S. supply of essential medicines is unreliable. Pharmaceutical supply chains are complicated. The details may vary greatly from one medicine to the next, but a single medication could start as raw materials from several countries around the world, which are processed into basic chemicals. These are then turned into active and inactive ingredients, possibly with dozens of distributors or manufacturers, before everything is finally combined into a medicine
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