American pharmaceutical companies are carrying out drug trials in China’s far-western Xinjiang region, where the United States says a genocide of the Uyghur population is taking place, U.S. lawmakers say.
In a letter to the Federal Drug Administration, the two top lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party requested an explanation of the practice, which they said is recorded in “hundreds” of entries on the FDA website “clinicaltrials.gov.”
The letter does not name any individual companies, but requests information from the FDA about how it approves such trials.
In the letter, Rep. John Moolenaar, a Republican from Michigan, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, questioned “the ethics of conducting these trials in Xinjiang,” where they said Chinese officials “force ethnic minorities … to participate in gruesome medical procedures, which likely overlap with FDA-approved research.”
Given that China does not allow independent evaluators to examine facilities in Xinjiang for rights violations, they added, there was reason to query if Uyghurs were being forced to undergo medical testing.
“As we know, there is simply no ability for firms to conduct due diligence to ensure that clinical trials done in [Xinjiang] are voluntary,” they wrote. “Given this, we believe that U.S. biopharmaceutical entities could be unintentionally profiting from the data derived from clinical trials during which the CCP forced victim patients to participate.”
The involvement of China’s People’s Liberation Army, they added, also raised “serious concerns” that the intellectual property of U.S.-based companies had been compromised and “co-opted” by Chinese firms.
In a list of questions for the FDA, the lawmakers also asked if the regulator has ever reviewed trials undertaken in Xinjiang or inspected facilities in the region. They also requested the FDA’s internal rules to ensure “ethical and safety standards” are observed in foreign trials.
‘Disturbing reality’
A spokesperson for the FDA declined to comment directly on the claims and told Radio Free Asia only that the regulator had “received the letter and will respond directly to the Members of Congress.”
In 2021, the U.S. government declared that a genocide was taking place against the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority in China, after years of mounting evidence about mass internment camps, torture, forced labor and forced sterilization taking place in Xinjiang.
