Earlier this week, TACD responded to the Trump administration’s request for comments regarding (in their words) Germany’s ‘persistent underpayment for innovative pharmaceutical products.’ The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) opened this Section 301 investigation earlier in June, part of a barrage of attacks on drug prices abroad under Executive Order 14297, “Delivering Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients.”

Pharmaceutical corporations have been raising prices on both sides of the Atlantic for years, placing growing pressure on patients and already stretched public health budgets. Now, industry groups are using their vast influence (and lobbying budgets) to weaponize the Trump trade agenda on their behalf. And the pressure is working.

In December, the U.S. and UK signed a pharmaceutical deal under which the UK committed to increasing NHS spending on new U.S. medicines in exchange for tariff relief on UK pharmaceutical and medical technology exports. New research finds that increased spending without additional funding will “create substantial opportunity cost elsewhere, having a direct effect on population health.” Said research finds that the deal is likely to result in upwards of 229,000 excess deaths in the UK – 92,000 more than during the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and June 2022. You read that right: this deal is likely to be deadlier for Britons than Covid.

Deals like this benefit Big Pharma at the expense of patients, and industry wants more of them. Now, despite the OECD’s findings that the U.S. and Germany are the two countries that spend the most on drugs, the Trump administration is targeting Germany to raise consumer prices under the demonstrably false notion that raising prices abroad will lower them domestically.

TACD’s comments to USTR’s Section 301 investigation are a reiteration of our statement in February calling out this pattern of attacks, decrying the false notion that raising drug prices abroad will help patients in the U.S. for the lie that it is, and calling for alternative models for medical R&D that delink innovation rewards from high prices.