On Sunday, a Chinese-owned media outlet boasted that China is earning a significant amount of money by selling syringes and needles to the United States in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that China started in the first place, as reported by Breitbart.
The Global Times, a Chinese state-run publication, pointed out how American officials have sworn under oath that China was responsible for producing 80 percent of all needles and syringes used in the U.S., and 90 percent of overall supplies worldwide. Although the virus has severely impacted most companies in most countries around the world, Chinese companies, which run sweatshops using cheap labor and low production costs, have been able to continue production at full capacity.
One anonymous Chinese executive told the Global Times that “orders have been piling up for several months, and we are expanding our production to meet the rising demand. With the new production lines to be completed in early May, our monthly capacity will be quadrupled to 40 million units.”
Others pointed out that the ongoing pandemic has exponentially increased the demand for medical supplies such as syringes and needles, which have incentivized Chinese corporations to increase production so that they can directly profit from the pandemic. Although the demand is also causing the prices of such supplies to rise, the price of Chinese-made products are still far lower than American-made products, due to China’s use of slave labor with no concerns for workplace safety or workers’ rights.