Is It Bad That Two-Thirds of Drug Manufacturing Facilities Are in Increasingly Disaster-Prone Areas?

By Dave Levitan | August 20, 2025 | 1:58pm

Screenshot via Baxter International/Youtube

Climate Pharmaceuticals

Is It Bad That Two-Thirds of Drug Manufacturing Facilities Are in Increasingly Disaster-Prone Areas?

When Hurricane Helene ravaged North Carolina, its impacts spread far beyond the edges of the storm. To wit: in severely damaging a company called Baxter’s North Cove facility, the entire country lost the biggest source of intravenous and peritoneal dialysis solutions we have. Shortages of these fluids lasted for months, potentially impacting patient care; Baxter only announced things were back to normal months later, in May of this year. Basically the same thing happened in 2017, when another Baxter facility got knocked offline in Puerto Rico when Hurricane Maria hit.

These were particularly stark examples, but there are thousands of manufacturers and other companies involved in medical and drug supply chains out there, and Helene made it clear that the whole system can be thrown into chaos by even a single damaging event. A study published on Wednesday put some numbers on it: of almost 11,000 US facilities that made or processed or otherwise were involved in drug production between 2019 and 2024, 6,819 of them were located in a county that faced at least one disaster declaration over that time period. That’s almost 63 percent of them.

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The researchers, from Harvard Medical School and the American Cancer Society, included fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and other severe storms in the analysis, which was published in JAMA. Those disasters affecting drug production included all of those types, though it was hurricanes that represented the primary culprit — just another way that the cyclones can have much longer and broader tails of death than the official casualty counts will show.

The key point here is that most of those disaster categories are getting worse — depending on which one, they are bigger or more widespread, stronger or longer lasting, and more severe in basically every way. Hurricanes intensify more rapidly — like Erin, currently hucking big waves and rip currents at almost the entire East Coast — and can drop more rain, like Helene did well after moving inland; wildfires explode in strength and burn earlier and more acreage; tornadoes may not be changing in strength due to climate change, but they are certainly migrating from their historic homes into new territory.

The consolidation of some forms of pharmaceutical production into just a few facilities, like with Baxter and IV solutions, will undoubtedly lead to similar problems at some point. Among other things, the study authors say that the findings underscore the need for “strategic allocation of production” in order to try and stave off the next drug- or medical device-related catastrophe — or at least lessen its impact.

“Drug shortages following weather disasters demonstrate how the pharmaceutical supply chain is not yet resilient to climate-related disruptions,” said the American Cancer Society’s scientific director of health services research Leticia Nogueira, in a statement. “These findings underscore the importance of recognizing climate-related vulnerabilities and the urgent need for supply chain transparency.”