Trump is planning to cut foreign countries out of the medical supply chain by executive order: adviser

On CNBC's Squawk Box, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro announced that President Donald Trump is planning an executive order to repatriate foreign supply chains for medicine back to the United States, to reduce the health care system's dependency on foreign countries.

“The essence of the order … is to bring all of that home so that we don’t have to worry about foreign dependency,” said Navarro. He said that the president is worried that 70 percent of the ingredients used in advanced pharmaceuticals "comes from abroad ... We’ve got face mask issues, goggle issues, things like that."

“We need to have" the VA, Health and Human Services, and the Pentagon "buy that from American producers on American soil,” he added.

The news comes shortly after reports that Trump offered the German firm CureVac a "large sum of money" to ensure that their coronavirus vaccine be developed "exclusively" for the United States — an offer which they refused.