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MAHA Supporters Not on Board With Trump’s Pfizer Deal
Proponents of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda are outraged over the Trump administration’s deal with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, with some saying it goes against the movement’s ethos of cutting out “Big Pharma” from the federal government.
On Tuesday, President Trump proudly announced from the Oval Office that Pfizer would be complying completely with his “Most Favored Nation” executive order — the company agreeing to sell its products in the U.S. at its lowest global prices in other developed countries and receiving relief from tariffs in exchange. The Trump administration held this agreement up as a major win for lowering drug prices in the U.S.
“This is an extraordinary benefit [to] the American people,” Kennedy said Tuesday from the Oval Office. “It’s a signal to every American family that we’re finally putting their health and financial security first, and it sets a new standard, one that says we won’t write blank checks to the drug industry.”
While Kennedy framed the action as keeping the pharmaceutical industry in check, supporters of his MAHA agenda criticized the apparent cooperation between the White House and a major drugmaker.
As NIH Launches New Autism Research Effort, the Focus Is on Environmental Factors
Last week, the National Institutes of Health made a $50 million bet: Understanding environmental factors, agency officials believe, will help researchers better understand why some people have autism.
The agency is doling that pot of money out to researchers behind 13 proposals, most of them aimed at understanding the condition’s etiology, or cause. Federal health officials believe that exposure to different kinds of environments — everything from your diet or geographic location to chemicals and pesticides — can influence the likelihood that a person will have autism.
“The NIH has invested a lot of money to study autism over the years, but the research has not produced the answers that families and parents of autistic children deserve, and autistic children themselves deserve,” the agency’s director, Jay Bhattacharya, said during a press conference in which President Trump and other top health officials unveiled efforts to reduce rising autism rates.
‘Make America Healthy Again’ Movement, Minnesota Farm Groups in Fight Over Pesticides
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported:
The “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement and American agriculture have been on a collision course this year, and at the center is a fight over commonly used pesticides. This May, a MAHA Commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named some pesticides as potentially problematic, citing studies that link these chemicals to cancers and reproductive issues.
Then in September, the commission released a strategy report that backed away from some earlier claims about pesticides. Ag groups like Minnesota Corn hailed the second publication, saying in a statement that growers had lobbied the federal government to defend the chemicals. Here’s why the battle between health activists and farm groups isn’t over.
Of the group of pesticides that MAHA often mentions, glyphosate is the most commonly used in Minnesota and around the world. It’s the active ingredient in Roundup weed killer, introduced by the U.S. company Monsanto in 1975. It’s a systemic herbicide, which means it’s designed to kill all sorts of plants — but crop seeds have been specifically bred to be resistant to the chemicals. In Minnesota, glyphosate is commonly used in row-crop fields, with 16.4 million pounds of glyphosate sold in 2023, according to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.
EPA Moves to Prioritize Review of New Chemicals for Data Centers
The Trump administration has begun prioritizing the review of new, potentially hazardous chemicals used in data centers that public health advocates and environmental attorneys warn could endanger workers, communities and the environment.
While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which made the announcement last month, has prioritized new chemical reviews for some industries in the past, advocates said the new EPA effort and an accompanying executive order, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” signed by President Trump go well beyond data centers and benefit the fossil fuel, nuclear and semiconductor industries, among others. They include what advocates said is unprecedented language that calls for the EPA to “ease” and “reduce” regulations.
“We inherited a massive backlog of new chemical reviews from the Biden Administration, which is getting in the way of projects as it pertains to data center and artificial intelligence projects,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in announcing the fast-track chemical review. “The Trump EPA wants to get out of the way and help speed up progress on these critical developments, as opposed to gumming up the works.”
New Mexico Lawmakers Propose Bill to Break From Controversial CDC Committee’s Vaccine Guidance
The Santa Fe New Mexican reported:
The New Mexico Senate on Wednesday advanced a bill to authorize the state Department of Health to set vaccination recommendations independent of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s powerful vaccine advisory committee.
Lawmakers were called back to Santa Fe on Wednesday morning for a special session that’s largely intended to address an expected decline in state revenues brought on by the multitrillion-dollar federal budget reconciliation law. However, Senate Bill 3, sponsored by Albuquerque Democrat Linda López, takes aim at the vaccination recommendations, another flashpoint federal policy issue.
On the Senate floor, Republicans expressed concern about the possibility of losing federal funding as a result of limiting the state’s reliance on federal vaccine guidance.
“It seems like we love to take federal dollars, but at the same time, we’re now appearing willing to thumb our nose at federal guidelines which accompany these funds,” said Sen. Pat Woods, R-Broadview.
The legislation comes in response to a chaotic few weeks in August and September, during which inconsistent federal recommendations on the latest COVID-19 vaccine generated confusion for pharmacies, health care providers and people seeking shots.
Trump Claimed a Win on Drug Prices, but Big Pharma Also Scored
It’s another lesson in pharmaceutical industry might. Last year, the U.S. negotiated “lower” Medicare prices but they were still double what Europe pays. President Donald Trump celebrated a long-promised victory Tuesday, announcing that he had used the threat of tariffs to prod pharmaceutical giant Pfizer into cutting U.S. drug prices. But the deal, under which the company would sell some drugs in the U.S. at the same low cost as in other countries, delivered a win for Pfizer, too.
President Donald Trump celebrated a long-promised victory Tuesday, announcing that he had used the threat of tariffs to prod pharmaceutical giant Pfizer into cutting U.S. drug prices. But the deal, under which the company would sell some drugs in the U.S. at the same low cost as in other countries, delivered a win for Pfizer, too. In the two days since the announcement, the company’s stock jumped 14% as investors realized the new U.S. prices posed little threat to profits.
It also allowed Pfizer to avoid import levies for three years. And because the Pfizer agreement is expected to serve as a model for other large drug companies negotiating with the White House, other pharmaceutical firms also saw their stock values rise.
It will take time to determine how much Trump’s moves will benefit American patients.
“This represents a win for” Pfizer, Akash Tewari, a Jefferies analyst, wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. He estimated that offering some new drugs at internationally comparable prices could cost Pfizer up to $723 million a year. That would amount to just over 1% of Pfizer’s $63.6 billion revenue last year.
