as of april 1,2020 The United States has not im

as of april 1,2020

The United States has not imposed any immediate restrictions on the export of PPE, medicine or medical devices used to treat COVID-19, despite its own severe shortages nationwide and reports of large quantities of PPE being purchased by foreign buyers. Indeed, the United States has long depended upon imports of such materials, and efforts to obtain emergency supplies of face masks and other PPE from manufacturers in China were hobbled by the U.S. administration’s efforts to label COVID-19 as the “Chinese” or “Wuhan” virus. Moving forward, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) has the authority to use the Export Administration Regulation (“EAR”) Short Supply Controls (15 C.F.R. Part 754) to curtail the export of items that may become scarce as the COVID-19 crisis continues. For example, certain PPE controlled under ECCN 2B352 could be subjected to short supply controls that impose more stringent licensing requirements, prohibit the use of license exceptions that would otherwise apply, or restrict the availability of export licenses. BIS even has the flexibility to apply the short supply controls to certain PPE or other items that may be designated EAR99 and therefore currently subject to the least restrictive export controls. BIS can list those EAR99 items on which it wants to impose short supply controls, along with their Harmonized System-based Schedule B commodity numbers, as BIS has done for certain crude oil and petroleum products. These controls currently only apply to a handful of items unrelated to COVID-19—petroleum products, unprocessed western red cedar, and horses exported by sea for slaughter—but BIS could expand the category of short supply items relatively quickly.

https://www.gibsondunn.com/covid-19-internati...-pandemic/