Virginia U.S. Senate candidate and retired U.S. Navy captain Hung Cao earlier this month toured a nearly-finished state-of-art nitrile rubber plant in southwest Virginia that President Joe Biden’s administration has abandoned, allowing China to be on track to become America’s largest supplier of rubber medical gloves, he told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.
“I don’t understand why Joe Biden hates America so much and hates American manufacturing,” Cao said in a recent phone interview after the visit. “We are waiting patiently for November 5th so we can go ahead and start this process and really build up the industry in southwest Virginia as well as bring more revenue to an area that’s been depleted.”
Cao said, during the Trump administration, the Departments of Defense (DOD) and Health and Human Services (HHS) had awarded Blue Star NBR a federal grant to build the nitrile rubber plant, which would manufacture the rubber necessary to make the blue rubber gloves in America in the case of another pandemic or national emergency and, most importantly, reduce America’s reliance on imported gloves.
The Blue Star NBR factory in Wytheville, Virginia, on December 8, 2023. (Allison Lee Isley for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The plant, located in Wytheville, Virginia, was expected to create 2,500 jobs and bring in $1.3 billion in revenue to the area, and it created 4,000 more jobs. Local Virginia politicians — both Republicans and Democrats — cheered the project.
Blue Star NBR completed building the nitrile rubber plant spring 2023 but ran out of funds due to inflation and the increased cost of building materials and energy costs before it could be hooked up to a power source.
However, the Biden administration’s HHS has, since last year, refused to provide more money to hook up the finished plant and build a planned adjacent rubber glove factory. Blue Star NBR was forced to begin mothballing the equipment in the factory so that it would not rust.
Cao said at the factory, he saw 60 brand-new 15-foot-diameter mixers whose engines had to be removed and stored in a climate-controlled place so they would not rust.
Blue Star NBR CEO Scott Maier’s appeals to the Biden administration have fallen on deaf ears. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has reportedly provided a grant to a factory in Louisiana that is further behind than Blue Star NBR.
Virginia U.S. Senate candidate and retired U.S. Navy captain Hung Cao touring a nitrile rubber plant in southwest Virginia. (Photo Courtesy of Hung Cao)
In the short time that it took for the rubber nitrile plant to be built, China went from being a small global supplier of the gloves to now being on track to become America’s (and the world’s) biggest supplier, as Breitbart News’s Matthew Boyle recently reported. America uses 120-150 billion gloves per year, for everything from medical appointments to lab work to preparing food.
Cao emphasized the national security implications of using cheap and potentially faulty gloves made by China.
“Right now, gloves touches us in many ways. Every day, you’re touched by gloves. So, everything from your first responders, to your surgeons and physicians, but also think about the meatpackers at the stores, or the food service industry, but also for the production of microchips,” he said.
“And the problem is with the latex gloves made in China, you don’t know what the quality can be, right? And so let’s go back to the drywall instance in 2010, when drywall was exuding chemicals and it was eating away at the insulation on electrical wires and plumbing. And also before that, the dog food that was contaminated, as well as the infant formulas. So this is the issue with Chinese-made products — that there’s no quality control. And who do you sue if something goes wrong, right?” he said.
Cao also raised the prospect of China — who was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic in the first place — refusing to supply America with gloves.
“What if we have another pandemic or another emergency, and we need that? And they said, ‘No, we’re not giving you any.’ This is the same gloves we use for chemical biological responses,” he said.
Cao said during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with the Obama administration’s depletion of the National Security Stockpile, the U.S. realized that a lot of the personal protective equipment (PPE) needed were not manufactured in the United States.
(Photo Courtesy of Hung Cao)
“In fact, for the latex gloves, 98 percent of our gloves are manufactured outside the United States. And so that became a strategic and national security issue,” he said, adding:
President Trump authorized what’s called the Defense Production Act, which allowed for the Health and Human Services Department to give loans or even grants to companies to start manufacturing everything from masks to gloves in the United States. And so this company down in southwest Virginia, it’s in an area that’s been decimated because of the attack on the coal industry. They were able to create this plant that would create about 25 percent of what we need in United States.
Cao said Blue Star NBR needs around $70 million to get the factory running and begin making gloves. However, Cao said the company’s CEO Scott Maier has “less than zero” hope the Biden would provide another grant.
“They only need another installment from HHS to build the first factory and then the revenue from the first factory would pay for the other five factories. And President Biden did not renew that. And neither did the two senators from Virginia. [Mark] Warner and Tim Kaine did not do anything to help push that along. And so there’s millions of dollars of equipment sitting there every day just rusting away. That could be making latex gloves for Americans,” he said.
(Photo Courtesy of Hung Cao)
While President Joe Biden, during the State of the Union address and at campaign events around the country, has touted his commitment to building up American manufacturing, Cao said he is shocked that the Biden HHS is refusing to provide any more funds to the nearly completed project.
“Shocking is the fact that HHS just said no, we have what we need. Because again, they’re reliant on the Chinese-made product instead of relying on Americans,” he said.
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