United States President Donald Trump has announced an agreement with US drug maker Pfizer to lower the cost of its prescription medication for the Medicaid programme for low-income Americans.
According to the deal, which the Trump administration signed on Tuesday, Pfizer agreed to sell its existing drugs to Medicaid patients at the lowest price offered in other developed nations and also committed to launching new drugs at the same price in the US as in other high-income countries.
Studies have shown that customers in the US pay more than three times as much for brand-name pharmaceuticals as in other wealthy countries.
The company also agreed to participate in a new website the US administration plans to start, called TrumpRx, which will allow people to buy drugs directly from manufacturers. Pfizer said many of its treatments will be offered at discounts that average some 50 percent through that platform.
The deal with Pfizer builds on an executive order Trump signed in May, setting a deadline for drug makers to electively lower prices or face new limits on what the government will pay. Trump said deals with other drug companies would be coming over the next week.
Consumers are not expected to start seeing lower prices under the Pfizer deal until 2026, senior administration officials told The Associated Press news agency.
Besides committing to lowering costs, Trump said, Pfizer agreed to spend $70bn in domestic manufacturing facilities, becoming the latest in a string of top drug makers to announce plans to build production in the US.
The White House did not immediately release details about the investment, but Pfizer said in a statement that the outlay would be dedicated to US research, development and capital projects in the next few years.
Trump has been talking for months about the need to lower drug prices and to boost US drug manufacturing, and on September 25, he announced he would impose a 100 percent tariff on imports of branded or patented pharmaceutical products from October 1 unless drug makers built manufacturing plants in the US.
As one of the largest US drug makers, Pfizer’s products include the COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty, the antiviral treatment Paxlovid and several cancer drugs.
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