The NHS needs cheap drugs, and our economy needs a thriving pharma industry. The president threatens both – no wonder Labour is grovelling to him
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overning in the era of Donald Trump has been Labour’s miserable misfortune. As our prime minister and king grovel to the global bully with royal folderol this week, we will probably feel the full humiliation of the would-be American king.
The recent blow to British life sciences is a brutal example of our serfdom. Trump’s threat to put a 250% tariff on medicines made abroad by pharmaceutical companies, unless they move their factories, research and legions of jobs to the US, is driving out the UK pharma industry. What’s to stop him? AstraZeneca has ditched a £450m vaccine plant in Liverpool. In a shock announcement last week, the US drugmaker Merck axed a half-built, £1bn London research facility next to the Crick Institute it was destined to work with. Eli Lilly is pausing investment in the UK while Novartis is understood to be “keeping its investments under review”.
Trump’s other objection is Europe paying lower prices – and especially the NHS – for drugs that can cost three times more in America: his executive order demands that the US gets the lowest prices. He protests about America “subsidising socialism aboard [sic] with skyrocketing prices at home”. Negotiations between the health secretary, Wes Streeting, and drug companies about fair prices have collapsed. This time, the pharma industry is backed up by presidential threat. Often reviled as capitalist beasts in the green pastures of the NHS, this year drug companies have a point: their voluntary agreement to pay a percentage of their income on sales to the NHS leapt from 15% to 23%. Streeting offered an extra £1bn to help ease that cut in profits, but they balked, and he temporarily walked, saying: “I won’t allow big pharma to rip off our patients or taxpayers.” Cheers all round.
