Dave McCormick
Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate David McCormick, who has called Chinese fentanyl a “terrorist threat” and an “insidious attack on America,” made some of his millions off of investments in China’s largest fentanyl manufacturer, according to a report from The Keystoneon Tuesday.
McCormick was serving as CEO of Bridgewater Associates in 2021 when it invested $1.7 million in China’s Humanwell Healthcare, the company that owns 90 percent of China’s market for fentanyl, according to a 2022 RAND Corporation report. McCormick served in his role at Bridgewater until January 2022. “In 2023, McCormick told the American Enterprise Institute that he was responsible for whatever the company did,” The Keystone reports.
Presumably, that includes investing in the largest fentanyl producer in the nation most responsible for the illegal fentanyl crisis in the U.S. That very fentanyl and the precursor chemicals for it are finding their way to Mexican gangs and across the border into the U.S. In 2021—the year McCormick’s hedge fund was profiting off the drug—opioids like fentanyl killed more than 5,400 Pennsylvanians and fentanyl seizures in the state increased by 346 percent.
McCormick, of course, has been campaigning against that scourge. “I think we need to treat it as a national security threat it is,” he told attendees at a Pittsburgh-area event in April, according to Keystone Newsroom. “What would I do? I would go after China in the sense I’d interdict ships, I would treat this like it’s nuclear plutonium.”
Recently, a super PAC supporting McCormick launched a $30 million ad campaign, with one ad featuring McCormick vowing to put an end to the crisis.
“Today we face a shadow growing on the Pacific horizon. … I’m proposing a new [path]. Stop the flow of fentanyl, ban purchases of American land and U.S. investment that supports the Chinese [Communist] Party,” McCormick says in that ad, according to The Keystone.
In 2022, days before uber-rich Connecticut resident McCormick launched his previous bid for Senate—he lost in that GOP primary to another uber-rich non-Pennsylvanian, Mehmet Oz—he was profiting off of the Chinese fentanyl industry. The same industry that has killed thousands of Pennsylvanians and hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
