Shaping Health Security, Supply Chains and Access to Care
Posted on: Thursday 23 July 2026
Photos from the Summer Gathering
In the past few months alone, medicines and healthcare have been drawn into global trade tensions in ways that would have seemed unlikely not long ago.
2025 and 2026 have provided a surfeit of headlines, each of which alone seems to point to geopolitical traumas that are changing the context for health security, and the supply chain across the whole healthcare spectrum.
Those headlines have ranged from the United States showing a sudden passion for tariffs and economic warfare; to the impacts of a more traditional form of warfare in the Persian Gulf, and a very real demonstration of the vulnerability of highly sophisticated industries dependent on global shipping chokepoints to very unsophisticated weaponry such as mines.
But, the prominence of those headlines creates a danger of misdiagnosis. In many ways while tariffs and recent blockades represent some of the symptoms, if you focus only on them you are in danger of missing the critical underlying geopolitical developments affecting health security and healthcare.
Healthcare and life sciences are not just affected by geopolitics; they are now themselves a central battleground in geopolitical conflicts between large powers around the world.
How did healthcare become the new geopolitical conflict frontier?
There is clearly nothing completely new about technology sectors finding themselves at the forefront of geopolitical dispute – and the companies in those sectors finding that what they would want to be pure commercial decisions suddenly have a different set of drivers and restrictions; and not ones that they can fully control. We have seen it before in sectors as varied as aviation, to telecommunications and semiconductor manufacture.
Now though, industries that use biological processes to develop technologies (primarily for human healthcare, but also to some extent for agriculture and some other manufacturing) are rising to the top of a number of governments’ concerns about international interdependence and cross-border technology sharing.
Why is that?
The first reason is a trend much wider than just this sector. There has been a collapse within political elites in the belief that a rising tide lifts all economic boats globally. Driven by political pressures, governments are centring the idea that economic growth in any one country is best achieved by outpacing your competitor countries – and in particular trying to monopolise critical technologies (and either exclude competitor countries from access to those technologies, or at least make dependence on you for them a price of allyship).
But there is a second reason that is much more important and more fundamental to why life sciences now finds itself in so many geopolitical battles.
Life sciences is at the centre of a technology ecosystem driving new national security concerns.
Take for example the convergence of AI and life sciences.
This offers massive potential positive gains for humanity; through ways in which AI has capabilities to accelerate traditional drug discovery timelines, crunch early-stage research data through machine learning to focus on factors most likely to drive success rates, and make possible new gene editing protocols.
Many of these potential gains are of course familiar to members of the FPM (and indeed there was an excellent blog by Dr Emma Dean and Dr Harjeet Dillon which summarised the debates around just this potential).
What FPM members have probably not spent as much time thinking about – but I can assure you that the military and defence establishments of many countries have – is the ways in which AI and biotech convergence is key to designing targeted bioweapons, and the leveraging of databases of genetic data enables population surveillance and manipulation.
It is the convergence of the capabilities of two critical technological frontiers in the life sciences, and the threat that creates through a national security lens, that means geopolitical battles now centre so often around the life sciences.
What do some of the new national security driven policies targeting life sciences look like?
On a policy level, the trends that we are seeing divide into two areas:
First, a group of policies aiming to either restrict access to markets to those from competitor countries, and/or result in other economic disadvantages to your competitors.
And secondly, a set of policies that aim to increase the incentivisation or economic advantage of your own country’s biotech sector (but very much in ways that exclude competitors from benefitting from that incentivisation.
We have seen examples of these approaches in action in markets around the world.
The EU has focused a little more on incentivisation. The EU Critical Medicines Act was certainly focused on reducing EU reliance on medicines manufactured outside the bloc, but a significant part of its method of delivering on that aim is to incentivise domestic medicine production. And both the funding, and regulatory simplification aims of the EU Biotech Act are similarly aimed at boosting competitiveness in the EU bloc versus competitors.
Both the 14th (2021-25) and 15th (2025 to 2030) Chinese Five Year plans aimed to drive the economic advantage of sector growth in China, through their focus on government-incentivised and directed R&D investment.
Japan focused its Bioeconomy Strategy on a reduction of regulation and a greater alignment of Japanese regulatory standards to those of other target markets – aiming to limit needs for reaccreditation of products that have been through a Japanese development/regulatory cycle.
India’s Bio Economy, Environment and Employment (Bio E3) policy aims of course to see significant growth in the Indian biotech sector (to a target of a $300bn value by 2030) – but with an emphasis that this needs to be delivered in order to secure national security self sufficiency.
The United States, relatively confident in its ability to finance and have domestic brainpower for significant innovation, is nevertheless highly focused on countering China’s rise as its main geopolitical concern. The predominant US aims have focused more on the restriction of development in China, with a connected aim which presumes that the reshoring of manufacture to the United States can also help lower pricing.
A flurry of US legislation over the last few years has been introduced in service of these aims, ranging from the Biosecure Act (which was signed into law at the end of 2025) which aimed to limit dependence on Chinese development and manufacture in the sector; to a range of export controls and tougher standards for investment screening which recognise that US capital investment potential is by far the strongest, and so wants to limit the potential for that capital to move globally as support sector development in countries that the US considered to be geopolitical rivals. It would also be easy to imagine that these trends in the US started with the second Trump administration, but in fact that would be incorrect. The Biden administration’s January 2025 biotech export control targeted advanced biotech equipment (mainly with a concern about export to China but also some other countries) crossed a Rubicon. It created a first of its kind new export control classification in the US for the biotech sector.
The results of these policy trends
If those are some of the policies that countries are adopting; there are then three broad areas of outcomes that they are then leading to.
- Trends in investment, including Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)
- New forms of geopolitical chokepoints; affecting biotech specifically
- Threats to health focused parts of the international infrastructure – specifically the WHO
1. Trends in investment, including FDI
Lazard (US investment bank) has estimated that there has been a major shift in patterns in life sciences FDI in recent years, directly attributable to geopolitics. Whereas ten years ago the predominant drivers of target location of FDI were factors such as academic clusters, talent location or more generic business/manufacturing factors such as availability of greenfield sites and planning permission; Lazard now estimate that approximately 50% of FDI in biotech decision making can be linked directly to a geopolitical policy dynamic by that they mean that the decision on investment was directly affected by either the positive geopolitical drivers; such as the availability of subsidies or the need to avoid the negative ones such as at the extreme being forbidden to make the investment on tech export control type grounds).
2. New forms of geopolitical chokepoints; affecting biotech specifically
The critical underpinnings of biotech are sadly almost all affected, in negative ways, by policy driven global chokepoints (note, by that I don’t mean geopolitics affecting physical chokepoints – like the Straits of Hormuz or Malacca; although of course the sector in terms of manufactured goods is also vulnerable to those sorts of chokepoints, in the way other sectors are too).
There are a new range of different sorts of chokepoints that are the result of a direct policy aim targeting a fundamental qualities of the biotech sector, and these include:
- Restricting the movement of data across borders
- Restricting the availability/flexibility of talent and human capital
- Restricting access to capital and R&D funding
- Restricting access to critical technologies
3. Threats to health focused parts of the international infrastructure – specifically the WHO
As we settle into a year since the US departure from the WHO it would be complacent to think that either the attack on the WHO specifically, or wider UN institutions (such as Unicef) from the US in particular is over; for a more complete picture so far, the US has withdrawn cooperation, in part of completely, from around 63 different UN institutions, so not only is the WHO decision far from alone – it’s also likely not to be easily reversed, certainly not by any foreseeable Republican President or Congress, but truthfully even by a Democrat.
However, it is worth saying that the WHO hasn’t wasted the time between the US serving notice and its departure to try and shore up an approach based on global action by remaining members. To some extent the WHO is pulling out a crisis manual written when in the late 1940s the USSR boycotted the institution for the best part of a decade. It’s just ironic that back then the US used that time and the absence of its Soviet rival as a moment to benefit from positioning itself more centrally in the WHO and UN more broadly. Now, all eyes are on China, India and to some extent Europe to see if they individually or collectively pull off the same feat.
Don’t just bring me problems, bring me solutions!
There is an approach to navigating this geopolitically turbulent world.
Baroness Shriti Vadera (the Chair of the financial services company, the Prudential) said that she thinks the world is in one of the periods that happen every 150 years or so, when there is a fundamental shift in global political and economic dynamics; and in those periods there are 15-20 years of major disruption until things settle down. I agree with her on that diagnosis, and on the prognosis too. So on that basis we have quite a few years of disruption still to come.
The FPM’s own recently published Horizon Scanning report said:
I would argue that “pivot point”, if grasped in the right way, could see businesses in this sector deliver at the forefront of what former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has predicted will be continued globalisation; albeit what he calls “managed globalisation lite”. By that he means the private sector working with the public sector to work out a balance that still allows private dynamism, but also being clear on how it is delivering public benefit specific to the markets in which it is operating.
Exactly how this is applied will be for different businesses to work out, but I predict that there will be some patterns to those who succeed, perhaps based on those businesses which apply the five recommendations below:
- Deepen strategic planning, to include contingency planning for sudden changes in policy and/or conflict.
- Understand that critical (in particular single point) dependencies are increasingly so risky that pricing in redundancy is in many areas no longer waste, it’s wisdom.
- Realise that geopolitical restrictions don’t just affect physical goods data, if anything they even more significantly are affecting data flows and human capital – so plan accordingly.
- If life gives you a lemon, make lemonade. That’s an American phrase, by which I mean that if the US government will no longer work with you, that may make you more attractive to other governments as an investor, or partner to businesses from their country.
- Think innovatively about partnerships and partnership structures. Some can enable cross-border openness without falling foul of some of the new geopolitical restrictions. But they are different to ways that you may have structured either business partnerships, or even project partnerships such as clinical trials with academic institutions, before.
The world is different. There is no hiding from that. But, with the right approach, these choppy waters are navigable. It won’t be as easy as the smooth, globalised world of a few years ago (and certainly not the even smoother world so many hoped for or predicted back then). But, done right while it won’t be as smooth, if any sector can work its way through that, then I think it is the sector that the members of the FPM work in.