Britain could be cut off from antibiotics supplies because of its ‘potentially catastrophic’ reliance on China for medication, a worrying new report reveals.

With China producing up to 90 per cent of the ingredients used in antibiotics, experts have warned that President Xi could deny the NHS and Armed Forces access to infection-killing medicines at any time.

While the UK and US source most of their antibiotics from India, India actually relies on China for 91.5 per cent of its antibiotics ingredients, the report from think tank Council on Geostrategy reveals.

This extreme concentration ‘exposes the US and Europe to the geopolitical calculations of the Chinese Communist Party’.

And in the event of a military conflict, this could see Beijing instantly severing medical supplies to Western forces and hospitals.

But China could also quietly apply a ‘health blockade’ outside of war by squeezing India’s supply, which would instantly starve the UK, Europe and America of important medications.

In the report’s foreword, Labour MP for North Durham Luke Akehurst warns that industrial failure in China, a sudden restriction on exports or a souring of relations between China and the UK could ‘paralyse the healthcare of Britain and its allies and partners across the Euro-Atlantic area within just a few weeks’.

Shadow home affairs minister Alicia Kearns adds that ‘we now face a reality where a single contamination event or geopolitical decision in a foreign and potentially hostile state could trigger catastrophic shortages across the United Kingdom’.

And the report’s author, Andrew Rechenberg, an economist specialising in pharmaceutical supply chains, writes that China’s control over antibiotics is ‘not just an economic problem’ but a ‘direct health security and national security vulnerability for the United States, Britain, and Europe’.

He adds: ‘When so much of the world depends on so few upstream plants and firms, even a single disruption can cascade across hospitals and health systems.’

This comes as the top four Chinese suppliers of antibiotics ingredients – North China Pharma, Sinobright Pharma, MS and Centrient Pharmaceuticals – account for 54 per cent of India’s imports, leaving global supplies dependent on only a tiny number of individual companies.

Meanwhile, only seven sites that manufacture the compound that produces penicillin are based in China, creating a severe ‘chokepoint’ in the global penicillin supply chain, the report warns.

And ‘sustained price suppression’ by China has cut the West out of the antibiotics manufacturing market, with only one penicillin production facility now operating in Austria.

Subsidised Chinese fermentation producers have driven global import prices down by around 80 per cent for antibiotics ingredients since 1992, crushing the margins of Western counterparts.

The report calls for Western governments to bring forward financial incentives to boost antibiotic manufacturing capabilities outside of India and China, and for tariff-rate quotas to counter the low-cost prices of antibiotics made abroad.

This is all extremely questionable, isn’t it? Our politicians do their best to convince us that China can’t be trusted, yet they still do business with them, making us dependent on their supplies.

Our UK government really have sold us out, and people are seeing the truth now, but then the truth always comes out in the end, and the truth is that the UK is driven by people who don’t even live here.

Our government and our preceding governments have allowed us to become dependent upon other countries for almost everything. Do we actually make anything for ourselves anymore?

You would have thought that after COVID, someone in government with even half a brain would have looked into this and identified areas where we are vulnerable and either need to produce ourselves or have more contingencies in place in case of shortages. Unfortunately, Labour has driven businesses into the ground, so now we are always going to be reliant on everyone else.