Thinkabit,
I'm an oldish Aussie who works fulltime and am a net taxpayer (if you've got kids I'm helping pay for you), I rely on my meds for which I pay a motza, you'll be old too one day and every one will eventually need a Dr and a pharmacy, I'm at a loss that some one could be so uncaring, you must be young and know everything!

the West is worse than Communists China.
ttbn,
Sadly, in too many instances this is correct !

.. at a loss that some one could be so uncaring,
FireballXL5,
Same here and, these are the people who drag up two centuries past on how badly people were treated by those who were treated just as bad & in many cases even worse.
How many times are old age pensioners accused of being on welfare when they've contributed during their whole 52 plus working years. Yet, these kids & many on the public payroll who don't even know yet what a job is, accuse old people to be welfare recipients which they're not !
They're investors who now exist on the dividends.

Well then FireballXL5 sad to hear about your aliment, but on the positive side my previous posts should leave you feeling relieved from any consternation that our resident chicken-little (ie: ttbn) may have caused. Because if you read my posts carefully, what I'm saying is that you will almost certainly survive if China blocks supply to us. This is because (for the third time):
1) Unless you have an extremely exotic ailment, you probably won't die if you skip your meds for a short time. And it would only be a matter of days before any dip in supply was corrected as explained in points below.
2) You will most likely already have a few weeks supply on hand at home because people don't buy the tablets each and every day*, but rather they buy a bottle/packs worth.
3) The pharmacy you use will have a small reserve of supply on hand. They normally have a small buffer of stock to cover the supply bumps between it and their distributor.
4) The non-Chinese based component of the supply chain will have a reserve of stock on hand (eg: importing businesses in Australia, they have to keep a enough supply on hand to cover between shipping arrivals)
5) The Government would have emergency stocks for common critical drugs. In general the government has secret warehouses dotted around the country where they store stuff for various potential emergencies like this.
6) Almost immediately, other friendly-to-us countries (such as the UK, USA, EU, Japan, New Zealand, Canada, India, etc.) would offer us help to deal with the problem. They would let us have emergency access to their own supplies and/or increase their own production for our benefit. Friend countries helping each other like this in times of crisis is very common.

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-- from above --

For example, just days ago to Tonga we sent and are continuing to send medical and food aid to help them deal with their volcano crisis. Or another example, if you remember back to the wine import ban/tariffs that China slapped on Australia in 2020, many of our friends offered support by promoting Australian wine to their own citizens.

7) China is not the only show in town when it comes to manufacturing drugs. Many other countries can make drugs (us included). Some of them, like India (which is a friendly country for us and as a bonus not at all the best of pals with China), are major players in world production. These countries will ramp up production to cover for China's decreased supply.

But besides all this, I should mention again: contrary to what the ttbn claims, it is extremely unlikely that China would use the restriction of drug supply as a tactic in ttbn's "grey war" between us and them. Countries just don't do this sort of thing when it concerns medicines. Denying medical aid is an unforgivable sin, not even combatants in barbaric Middle East conflicts do this. If China ever did this, they will be denounced by almost every other country on the planet and immediately become an international pariah.

Oh, by-the-way: I myself am a middle aged self funded retiree, and at a blind guess I would say that I've paid *way* more tax than you (as an example of just how much tax I've paid in my life, over the last two years alone I've paid more than two million**).

[* well there might be some extremely weird disease out that requires fresh daily made compounds, but I've never heard of such a thing.]
[** admittedly my recent tax bills have been very high because I've done hansomely out of the Covid crisis. Normally it's more like $300,000 to $600,000 each year]

Oops, "aliment' above should obviously be "ailment".