Why Medical Supply Chains Face a Deeper Shock Ahead

The shortage of helium triggered by the recent Strait of Hormuz closure is exposing a more fundamental problem than a disrupted gas market.

It is revealing how quickly medical supply chains can shift from exposed to structurally constrained when energy corridors and trade routes destabilise.

Iranian strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s single largest helium source, removed about 30-38% of global supply overnight.

While the Strait is now open following the US-Iran ceasefire, transportation remains fragile, at best, and conflict still threatens the region.

The most visible pressure point as a result of the global helium crisis is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These scanners depend on liquid helium to cool superconducting magnets, a requirement that cannot be easily engineered away at scale across global hospital systems.

But helium is not the origin of the problem. It is an early indicator of how far upstream disruption is now reaching into healthcare infrastructure.

“We’re already hearing of shortages starting to come through in the UK: complex biologics, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), even oncology drugs,” Richard Sullivan, Professor of Cancer and Global Health at King’s College London, tells the British Medical Journal.

“We’re seeing disruption in supply chains for cancer drugs and consumables for robotic surgery, which uses up an awful lot of equipment every time you operate on somebody."

Energy analysts estimate it could take up to five years to restore full capacity at Ras Laffan LNG facility. That alone tightens a market already vulnerable to concentration risk.

Energy corridor instability

Yet the deeper issue is not a single facility. It is the instability of the energy corridor that supports it.

The conflict in the Middle East has sparked disruption now feeding through into multiple layers of industrial production. That matters because modern healthcare systems are not insulated from petrochemical supply chains. They are built on them.

“We know from past crises that reduced air freight space means supply priority moves to higher value drugs, and that strains generics where margins are thin,” says Nadya Wells, a medical supply chain researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Global Health Centre. “Then there are the API risks from sea freight costs increasing and routes taking longer."

Pharmaceutical manufacturing depends on oil and gas derivatives for solvents, reagents, catalysts and excipients. Medical plastics, sterile packaging and cleaning systems are similarly dependent. Even small shifts in feedstock pricing or availability can ripple into production costs and availability.

Logistics is tightening at the same time. Higher fuel prices and disrupted flight routes are reducing air freight capacity, which is critical for temperature sensitive medicines and biologics. Sea freight delays are extending lead times for active pharmaceutical ingredients, creating lagged shortages rather than immediate ones.

A system absorbing shocks

Helium illustrates the same logic in physical form.

“Deliveries of helium expected from Qatar, if any, that would have arrived in the UK soon, will not be arriving,” Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting, says in the BMJ. “The UK does not produce helium, nor does it have a storage facility beyond inventory at end users. Nothing that would last months."

MRI systems sit at the far end of the chain. When helium tightens, imaging capacity does not fail immediately. It degrades over time as supply runs down, maintenance becomes harder and replenishment becomes uncertain.

That lag is what makes this crisis significant for the medical world. The system is already absorbing shocks that have not yet fully reached clinical delivery.