Washington [US], August 25 : Several lawmakers have urged the US Food and Drug Administration to initiate an investigation over US biopharmaceutical companies conducting clinical trials alongside the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in Xinjiang, The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (SCCCP) said in a release.
In a recent letter submitted to Robert Califf, the commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration department, US lawmakers John Moolenaar, the Chairman of SCCCP, along with Raja Krishnamoorthi, Anna Eshoo and Neal Dunn, raised serious concerns that the PLA is co-opting sensitive intellectual property through these clinical trials and questioned the ethics of conducting these trials in Xinjiang, where the Chinses administration is already involved in human rights abuses over the Uyghur community.
The SCCCP statement claimed that "Publicly available information on the FDA's website, 'clinicaltrials.gov', reveals that major US biopharmaceutical companies have conducted hundreds of clinical trials alongside a PLA entity over the last 10 years. In addition to working with the PLA, the lawmakers identified U.S. companies conducting clinical trials in Xinjiang. The CCP forces ethnic minorities in Xinjiang to participate in gruesome medical procedures, which likely overlap with FDA-approved research".
The SCCCP members also question the correctness and trustworthiness of the trial results by stating that the questioned clinical trial data was produced overseas from PLA institutions. "The FDA has previously declined to approve oncology treatments based on clinical trial data solely produced from clinical trial sites in China, suggesting the FDA should also impose similar scrutiny to clinical trial work done in cooperation with the PLA," the statement read.
The letter written by the SCCCP to FDA stated, " According to the publicly available data on the clinicaltrials.gov website, over the last ten years, major US biopharmaceutical companies have conducted hundreds of clinical trials in China that included at least one entity with PLA in the name of a research trial partner. Even today, one major U.S. biopharmaceutical entity is actively recruiting patients for an advanced Alzheimer's drug trial and is partnered with the PLA's General Hospital and Medical School and the PLA's Air Force Medical University. Previously, another U.S. biopharmaceutical entity used the 307 Hospital of the PLA as the setting for a cancer therapeutic clinical trial. The 307 Hospital of the PLA is directly operated by the PLA's Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), an entity on the US Department of Commerce's Entity List that precludes U.S. companies from transferring technology to The Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science (AMSS) due to the threat it poses to US national security".
In addition to working with the PLA, there are also US biopharmaceutical trials listed on the website that were conducted with hospitals located in the XUAR, where credible investigative reports have shown that ethnic minorities in the region are repeatedly forced by the CCP to surrender their body autonomy.
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