Almost $1 Billion Later, the US Still Can’t Manufacture Medical Gloves

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Sarah Holder** (0:10)
Nitrile medical gloves are supposed to be abundant and identical. They're all made out of the same material and engineered the same way, so that medical professionals can use and remove them over and over throughout the day without skipping a beat.

**Anna Edney** (0:24)
These gloves are the ones you see in every exam room. When you go to the doctor or the hospital.

**Sarah Holder** (0:31)
That's Anna Edney. She reports on the health care industry.

**Anna Edney** (0:34)
They're disposable. There are billions of these. There's about 120 billion that are used in the US annually.

**Sarah Holder** (0:43)
120 billion used every year in the US, not only in the medical field, but in industries like food service, auto repair, and pharmaceutical production. The US government alone buys around 2 billion of these gloves annually for federal workers like health care professionals and airport security.
But only about 1% of these nitrile gloves are actually made in the US.

**Anna Edney** (1:08)
They're made in Malaysia, and the companies in Malaysia get the main ingredient for those gloves from China. That's where they get the petroleum product, nitrile butadiene rubber. So essentially, we are reliant on China for the medical gloves, and in addition to kind of the tensions with China, there's also the war with Iran.

**Sarah Holder** (1:31)
The war has disrupted ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which has made it harder and more expensive to transport petroleum products.

**Anna Edney** (1:45)
Essentially, we're in this spot, which we sort of weren't wearing COVID for different reasons, where the glove supply is kind of on thin ice, and the hospitals are trying to make sure that they can get enough.

**Sarah Holder** (2:00)
When nitrile gloves were in short supply during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government came up with a plan to wean the US off of imported medical gloves and make more of them domestically.
Since then, six American companies have been granted almost a billion dollars in government contracts to bolster the U.S.'s manufacturing capacity and build more factories to produce NBR. Now, the US is staring down the possibility of another medical glove shortage. But Anna says the country still isn't prepared.

**Anna Edney** (2:36)
The companies are not making gloves and they are not making the rubber.

**Sarah Holder** (2:47)
I'm Sarah Holder and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, why the US couldn't stand up its own nitrile medical gloves industry in the years since COVID. And what the failed push to make medical gloves says about broader efforts to reshore American manufacturing.
So, Anna, you've been looking into the U.S.'s effort to ramp up domestic manufacturing of an extremely important product that often gets taken for granted. Nitrile gloves. Why are they so challenging to make in the US.?

**Anna Edney** (3:23)
There's a really important key ingredient that's needed to make these. It's nitrile butadiene rubber, NBR. That mostly is coming from China. We do not make any of that NBR here. We used to make it here decades ago.
It's just cheaper and easier with environmental regulations and things to do this in other countries.

**Sarah Holder** (3:49)
So that was the status quo for a long time, right? The US would buy billions of these nitrile gloves a year, largely from other countries. But during the pandemic, the supply of medical gloves emerged as a real issue in the US. The US government had a plan for ramping up domestic supply.
What was that plan?

**Anna Edney** (4:06)
Yeah, so we all learned that COVID was airborne.
We wanted to protect ourselves. Certainly, you know, the medical professionals wanted to protect themselves. So the demand for medical gloves just skyrocketed, and, you know, the hospitals weren't able to get them. What happened was the Trump administration, during the first Trump administration during COVID, was going to give out contracts to companies that were willing to set up glove factories or factories that could make the main ingredient in these gloves, nitrile-butadiene rubber. And then it was the Biden administration that actually gave out the contracts. So they gave out about $850 million to six companies to get that started.

**Sarah Holder** (4:57)
And how did that plan work out?

**Anna Edney** (5:00)
You know, some of them got started, they quickly folded, they shut down their glove operations. They weren't able to sell those essentially because they cost a lot more than the gloves made in Malaysia, where we get most of our gloves from. You sort of need more infrastructure than just the buildings and just the manufacturing. And during this time, you know, when the companies were trying to get up and running, they quickly found out that already our attention span had kind of switched in the US as it does, especially with pandemics and kind of public health emergencies.