The pharmaceutical sector appears to be next in Donald Trump's firing line, with the US President this week hinting at further carnage following his far-reaching tariffs on imported goods announced last week.
Although Trump had initially excluded pharmaceutical products from tariffs on imported goods, on Tuesday, he said: “I know what the hell I’m doing”, adding that he would announce “a major tariff on pharmaceuticals” very shortly, according to The New York Times. No specific countries were mentioned.
Earlier this week, Pharmaceutical Task Group chair Stavros Nicolaou had said there was no imminent risk to South African patients of supply chain disruption or price increases.
“If SA had imposed retaliatory tariffs, prices would have risen, but that is not likely at this time,” he told BusinessLIVE.
The country is a net importer of pharmaceuticals and medical technology, with the biggest US firms that export pharmaceuticals to SA being Merck, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Gilead, Eli Lilly and Amgen.
But in Europe, pharmaceutical companies in the EU warned of a “risk of exodus” to the US as stocks in the sector slid around the world on the back of Trump’s renewed threat to impose tariffs on US drugs imports.
The Guardian reports that drugmakers’ shares across Europe and India, another foreign drugs hub, slipped yesterday after Trump indicated more tariffs in addition to the 20% “reciprocal tariffs” on imports that kicked in overnight.
A basket of European healthcare stocks fell 3.9% after opening to its lowest since October 2022, leading losses among sectoral indices on the region-wide Stoxx 600, down 2.3% in early trading on Wednesday. Shares in AstraZeneca were down more than 5%, GSK more than 4%, Roche 5.6% and Sanofi was also down more than 5%.
There was also a hit in India, where companies such as Teva are among the world’s biggest medicine manufacturers making everything from branded paracetamol to active ingredients in pharmaceutical products through manufacturing contracts with some of the world’s biggest brands.
Trump imposed fresh tariffs on imports from 57 countries and territories at midnight US eastern time, including a 20% levy on goods from the EU’s 27 member states, 104% on China and 27% on India. These followed 10% tariffs on imports from all countries imposed last Friday.
Pharmaceuticals have so far been exempted from the levies, but on Tuesday evening the US president told an event at the National Republican Congressional Committee that he would announce a large tariff on drugs imports “very shortly”.
Trump claimed the tariff would incentivise drug companies to move their operations to the US, but has not said when and by how much he planned to raise the levy.
EU pharma firms have called on the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, to push for “rapid and radical action” to mitigate the “risk of exodus” to the US after a meeting in Brussels.
The industry trade lobby the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), whose members including Bayer, Novartis and Novo Nordisk, the maker of the star diabetes type 2 drug Ozempic, met Von der Leyen on Tuesday hours before Trump issued his fresh threat.
Other members include Pfizer, Lilly, Gilead, GSK, Teva and Merck, together representing billions of exports to the US.
Trump’s latest comments have intensified the trepidation felt in pharma manufacturing hubs around Europe including Ireland, which exported €44bn of pharmaceuticals to the US in 2024, much of it made by US multinationals Trump wants to repatriate.
“We’re going to tariff our pharmaceuticals and once we do that they are going to come rushing back into our country because we are the big market, the advantages we have over everybody is that we’re the big market,” Trump told Republican supporters.
“So we’re going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals.”
The pharma industry in the EU has remained silent on the threat of tariffs since Trump’s “liberation day”.
EFPIA’s first statement, titled “Pharma CEOs alert president von der Leyen to risk of exodus to the US,” said that “unless Europe delivers rapid, radical policy change then pharmaceutical research, development and manufacturing is increasingly likely to be directed towards the US”.
It said a survey of its members last week showed that capital expenditure, money pumped into manufacturing plants, and R&D were the frontline risks.
It added that the US was becoming a clear favourite for investment, with tariffs expediting that potentially, putting at risk hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The association presented von der Leyen with a five-point plan, including strengthening incentives to locate intellectual property in Europe and the adoption of a worldwide set of rules to make it more attractive to place innovation and research and development in Europe.
Meanwhile, a group of public health experts and major labour organisations is suing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over what it calls an “ongoing ideological purge” of scientific research.
In a legal complaint filed last week, the American Public Health Association; the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW); and other health experts said the NIH had abruptly cancelled hundreds of grants since February 2025.
The cuts have targeted research tied to topics like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), gender identity, vaccine hesitancy and even work involving collaborators in other countries, they said, arguing that the terminations provide a “window into the devastation to medical and scientific research playing out across the nation”.
The lawsuit claims the NIH veered from its usual science-based review process and started shutting down projects based on “vague” new priorities. It alleges that the organisation justified cancellations by saying the research “no longer effectuates agency priorities”.
Researchers affected by the cuts include those studying Alzheimer’s disease, pregnancy health disparities and HIV prevention.
“More than $2.4bn is at stake just in grants recently purged, including $1.3bn already spent on projects stopped midstream and now wasted, and $1.1bn – on which the Plaintiffs and others have acted in reliance – has been revoked,” according to the complaint.
“Ending these NIH grants wastes taxpayer money and years of hard work to answer the world’s most pressing biomedical questions. This is an attack on scientific progress itself,” Brittany Charlton, a plaintiff and associate professor at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, said.
“Important discoveries and treatments will be delayed, putting lives at risk. Health issues in one community affect everyone, so this concerns us all.”
The complaint also describes how, after the wave of executive orders from Donald Trump aimed at eliminating DEI programmes and “gender ideology” from the federal government, NIH leadership began circulating internal memos instructing staff to identify and halt grants that mentioned those topics.
But the suit alleges that the “purge of critical research projects” went beyond DEI, reports The Guardian.
The NIH’s “eradication of peer-reviewed science has not stopped at topics deemed to be related to gender or DEI”, the complaint states.
“Defendants’ ideological purity directives also seek to cancel research deemed related to ‘vaccine hesitancy’, ‘Covid’, and studies involving entities located in South Africa and China, among other things.”
The agency also reportedly blocked funding applications mid-review and scrubbed DEI-related language from its website.
If these cuts continue, “scientific advancement will be delayed, treatments will go undiscovered, human health will be compromised, and lives will be lost”, the lawsuit warns.
The Guardian – NIH sued over ‘ideological purge’ of DEI, Covid and vaccine research
The Guardian – EU drug companies warn of exodus to US as Trump threatens import tariffs
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