The few domestic companies that still make protective gear for health care workers have clamored for federal intervention. But they worry President Trump’s trade war with China won’t help.
Few domestic industries have been as devastated by the flood of cheap Chinese imports as manufacturers of face masks, exam gloves and other disposable medical gear that protects health care workers from infectious pathogens.
The industry’s demise had calamitous consequences during the Covid pandemic, when Beijing halted exports and American hospital workers found themselves at the mercy of a deadly airborne virus that quickly filled the nation’s emergency rooms and morgues.
But as President Trump unveiled his tariff regimen earlier this month, and Beijing retaliated with an 84 percent tax on American imports, the few remaining companies that make protective gear in the United States felt mostly unease.
“I’m pretty freaked out,” said Lloyd Armbrust, the chief executive of Armbrust American, a pandemic-era startup that produces N95 respirator masks at a factory in Texas. “On one hand, this is the kind of medicine we need if we really are going to become independent of China. On the other hand, this is not responsible industrial policy.”
The United States once dominated the field of personal protective equipment, or P.P.E. The virus-filtering N95 mask and the disposable nitrile glove are American inventions, but China now produces more than 90 percent of the medical gear worn by American health care workers.
Despite bipartisan vows to end the nation’s dependency on foreign medical products — and to shore up the dozens of domestic manufacturers that sprang up during the pandemic — federal agencies have resumed their reliance on inexpensive Chinese imports. Industry experts say the country’s renewed dependence on imported medical products is especially concerning given an expanding measles outbreak, the threat of avian flu and a trade war with China that some worry could affect global supply chains.