Americans have waited long enough, and now real relief from sky-high prescription drug prices is finally here. Recently, President Donald J. Trump signed a landmark Executive Order to end the decades-long injustice that has forced American families — especially Hispanic households — to pay more for lifesaving medications than almost anyone else in the world.
Hispanics, who are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured compared to other groups, are disproportionately burdened by high out-of-pocket prescription costs. In fact, according to the CDC, nearly one in four Hispanic adults report not taking prescribed medications due to cost, compared to just 13% of non-Hispanic White adults. This Executive Order directly addresses that disparity by demanding lower drug prices and making medications more affordable and accessible for millions of working families across the country.
This bold order reaffirms the President’s unwavering commitment to putting American patients first by stopping foreign free-riding, crushing the stranglehold of pharmaceutical middlemen, and bringing fairness back to a rigged system.
Under President Trump’s leadership, America is no longer the world’s piggy bank for pharmaceutical giants and socialized healthcare systems abroad. This Executive Order directs the U.S. Trade Representative and Secretary of Commerce to hold foreign nations accountable for the unfair practices that underpay for prescription drugs and undermine lifesaving drug development. In essence, Americans — who fund the bulk of pharmaceutical innovation through our taxpayer dollars and higher prices — have been subsidizing socialism abroad. No more.
For many Americans across the U.S., especially those economically impacted by high healthcare costs, this Executive Order is a game changer. Families working long hours, often balancing multiple jobs, should not have to choose between buying insulin for their children or groceries for the week. President Trump’s directive ensures that low-income patients, seniors, and working-class Americans will now have direct access to the same steep discounts that pharmaceutical companies give to patients overseas through government-negotiated prices.
That means bypassing the costly middlemen and securing medicines at “most-favored-nation” prices that reflect the best deal given to any other country in the world. If drug manufacturers refuse, the Order empowers the Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to act decisively: impose these pricing standards through regulation and take additional aggressive steps to drive costs down. This is what America First leadership looks like.
Let’s not forget: President Trump has been down this road before. In his first term, he introduced bold reforms to ensure that Medicare would no longer overpay pharmaceutical companies — specifically, by requiring that prices for Medicare-covered drugs be no higher than those paid in comparable countries. These common-sense measures were rescinded by the Biden-Harris Administration before they could take effect. The result? A so-called “victory” for Medicare that actually left American taxpayers and seniors paying an average of 78% more for prescription drugs than patients in eleven other advanced nations. That’s not a win — it’s a disgrace.
Now, in his second term, President Trump is finishing what he started. This new action builds upon earlier victories, including transparency in hospital pricing, the push for generics and biosimilars, and expanded drug importation options. These initiatives are part of a comprehensive, America First healthcare agenda focused not on enriching bureaucracy, but on empowering patients.
For those disproportionately affected by chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and asthma, this move provides tangible economic relief. It ensures families can access the medicine they need to stay healthy. It means hardworking Americans can afford care without risking financial ruin. And it signals that forgotten communities are no longer overlooked — they are being heard and prioritized.
We should also be clear: this isn&#8217;t just good policy. It’s great politics. President Trump is showing the American people that he’s not afraid to stand up to entrenched interests to deliver real results. He’s not beholden to Big Pharma, nor is he willing to play nice with foreign governments who exploit our generosity while we suffer at home.
In an era where politicians too often offer empty promises and soaring rhetoric, President Trump delivers. His commitment to reforming healthcare pricing is not just about economics—it’s about justice. And make no mistake: justice is exactly what millions of Americans, especially those in underserved communities, have been demanding for years.
President Trump said it best: “Our citizens pay massively higher prices than other nations pay for the same exact pill, from the same factory.” That ends now.
This is more than an Executive Order. It’s a promise fulfilled, a burden lifted, and another bold move in President Trump’s mission to restore prosperity, fairness, and dignity to the American people.
* * *
Bobby Jindal is the former Governor of Louisiana and Chair of the Center for a Healthy America at America First Policy Institute.
Jorge Martinez is National Director for Hispanic Outreach for America First Policy Institute. He previously served as press secretary for the U.S. Department of Justice.

Trump Vows US Drug Price Cuts Of Up To 80% In Industry Blow

Trump’s Bold Move To Lower Drug Prices Puts Americans First, Not Big Pharma

Trump's Bold Move To Lower Drug Prices Puts Americans First, Not Big Pharma

Big Pharma

Opinion

Pharmaceuticals

Prescription Drugs

President Trump

Trump Administration

White House

President Donald Trump’s new <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/12/trump-most-favored-nations-drug-price-order-what-to-know.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">executive order</a> on prescription drug prices — which he called “one of the most consequential executive orders in our country’s history” — may well live up to the hype, but not in the way Trump intends.
Trump&#8217;s announcement of a “most favored nation” <a href="https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/global-trends/us-news-trumps-most-favored-nation-drug-pricing-policy-and-how-will-it-reduce-costs-slash-prescription-drug-prices-by-30-to-80-percent/articleshow/121109365.cms" target="_blank" rel="noopener">policy</a> means the United States government will only pay drug prices equal to the lowest paid by any developed nation. This is what Germany, France, Canada, and the United Kingdom currently do: pay less for drugs than they’re worth. In turn, the United States picks up the tab when it buys up drugs for Medicaid.
We overpay, and it’s easy to write it off as unfair freeloading by Europe, a recurring theme for the Trump administration. But this remedy will not come without its costs, and consumers will feel it down the line.
The Trump administration&#8217;s solution for drug pricing is identical to its approach to tariffs. Instead of finding leverage in a target-rich environment to coerce Europe into paying market rates, thus giving American consumers a break, they’ve decided to join the race to the bottom. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) must be quietly pleased to see his socialist dream of price controls go mainstream within the MAGA coalition, even though he has <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-warning-trump-drug-pricing-executive-order-2071155" target="_blank" rel="noopener">warned</a> that Trump’s drug pricing measure would be better served by legislation.
If it was not clear to Republicans before, it should be now that free market policymaking is on the outs in the second Trump administration.
Let’s be honest about what’s happening. The White House wants to trim federal <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AmCRxm6P4o" target="_blank" rel="noopener">spending</a> without touching politically sensitive programs like Medicaid. To square that budgetary circle, they’ve decided to force pharmaceutical companies to sell their products to American patients at the same rate they’re sold to socialized healthcare systems abroad.
This move, unthinkable for a Republican administration two decades ago, assumes that America can have the world’s most innovative pharmaceutical sector and also ask “Big Pharma” to forgo the billions in profits they reinvest back into research and development. It’s a fantasy.
The United States is the engine of pharmaceutical innovation. Over half of all new drug patents originate here specifically because America allows firms to see a return on investment. Drug development isn’t like manufacturing sneakers or soda. It’s a high-risk, capital-intensive endeavor where failure is more common than success. A single treatment can take over a decade to develop, cost billions, and then <a href="https://med.uc.edu/depart/psychiatry/research/clinical-research/crm/trial-phases-1-2-3-defined#:~:text=Subjects%20in%20a%20Phase%20II,go%20on%20to%20Phase%20III." target="_blank" rel="noopener">never make it</a> to FDA phase III trials.
Cutting-edge treatments come to market and make the impossible suddenly possible, albeit at a premium price point. It’s true, on brand-name drugs, Americans <a href="https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/comparing-prescription-drugs#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20U.S.%20prices%20across,adjustments%20for%20estimated%20U.S.%20rebates." target="_blank" rel="noopener">pay a lot</a> more.
However, like clockwork, generics get developed and costs for the consumer crater. Generic medications account for 91% of prescriptions in the United States. For those, we <a href="https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1921730579675934991" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pay far less</a> for those drugs than nearly any other country, something Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro <a href="https://youtu.be/XYBuphYtp6I?si=U5SKZ4aI99bvS70w&amp;t=2662" target="_blank" rel="noopener">explained</a> this week.
If Medicaid won’t pay a fair price, pharmaceutical companies will raise prices on private insurers to compensate. That means higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs for millions of Americans who get coverage through work or on the open market.
And that’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/6/7/22522479/medicaid-health-insurance-doctors-billing-research" target="_blank" rel="noopener">assuming</a> companies continue to sell to Medicaid at all.
Why isn’t Trump hammering European nations that want access to American-made drugs and have them negotiate fair, value-based deals for our biotech? It’s a crown jewel of America that global elites travel near and far to access. We should be twisting wrists abroad, not kneecapping our pharmaceutical industry.
<div>If we want lower drug costs, allowing drug approval reciprocity — as <a href="https://www.paul.senate.gov/dr-rand-paul-introduces-legislation-to-modernize-fda-prescription-drug-approvals-and-lower-drug-prices/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.paul.senate.gov/dr-rand-paul-introduces-legislation-to-modernize-fda-prescription-drug-approvals-and-lower-drug-prices/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1747494596378000&amp;usg=AOvVaw27BgpCiXpYt8qvN3lERP1n">suggested</a> by Sen. Rand Paul — to increase competition between drug approval regulators globally would be a great start. The FDA’s approval process could also be reformed to accelerate trials and drug approval.</div>
America leads the world in medical breakthroughs for a reason. We cannot afford to surrender that leadership by copying the failures of Europe’s socialized health systems. Europe as we know it today is a warning, not a model.
Stephen Kent is the Media Director of the Consumer Choice Center.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-HEALTH-TRUMP-KENNEDY

Undermining American Pharmaceutical Companies Won’t Make Drugs Cheaper

Donald Trump

Europe

Executive Orders

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

President Trump signs an executive order to stop Big Pharma from charging Americans more than their European counterparts. Stocks surge after tariffs are slashed, as the U.S. and China announce a temporary truce in the trade war. And, Air Force 1 needs an update. Will Trump accept the offer of a $400 million “flying palace” from Qatar?
It’s Tuesday, May 13, and this is the news you need to know to start your day.
Morning Wire is available on video! You can watch today’s episode here:
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<h2>Trump EO To Lower Drug Prices</h2>
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Topline: President Trump signed what he called “one of the most consequential Executive Orders in our Country’s history” on Monday to dramatically lower the prices of prescription drugs.
Trump said his newest executive order would lower drug prices in the U.S. by up to 80% by implementing the “most favored nation” policy, cutting out industry “middlemen,” and compelling the European Union and other allies to pay for research and development of various drugs. He argued that since other nations set price controls for drugs, it’s been America that’s left taking on all these research and development costs.
“Starting today, the U.S. will no longer subsidize the healthcare of foreign countries,” Trump said. “We will no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from Big Pharma. But again, it was really the countries that forced Big Pharma to do things that, frankly, I’m not sure they were comfortable doing.”
The order will allow Americans to buy drugs directly from manufacturers, cutting out pharma “middlemen.” These so-called “middlemen,” pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), work with insurance providers to negotiate prices with drug companies in exchange for including the drugs in their coverage. Critics say PBMs are not transparent and don’t have an incentive to lower drug prices for Americans. The order also sets a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-prescription-drugs-prices-most-favored-nation-4c620a32ccd193b793ba1558f3fe93e0">30-day deadline</a> for HHS to work with drugmakers to reduce the costs of these prescription drugs. If a deal is not reached, a new rule will kick in that will effectively lower the drug price to what other nations are paying for them.
“The fundamental problem in healthcare is we&#8217;ve had non-competitive markets,” Dr. Marty Makary, the head of the Food and Drug Administration, <a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1921938509826298179">said</a> on Monday. “We can do little things around the edges, or we can transform those markets to competitive markets and that&#8217;s what this executive order does today.&#8221;
Democrats, who as a general rule have opposed President Trump’s policies, have remained mostly silent on this executive order. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), an independent and democratic socialist who caucuses with the Democrats, said that he agrees with Trump about the high prices of prescription drugs, but he did not back this EO, arguing that it would be blocked by the courts. Trump implemented a similar regulation for certain cancer drugs during his first term. The Biden administration, however, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-says-he-will-sign-executive-order-aimed-at-lowering-drug-prices-2a5b9b28">abandoned</a> the regulation after a court struck it down on procedural grounds. Sanders also made it clear that he doesn&#8217;t agree that the European Union or Canada needs to pay their &#8220;fair share&#8221; – he thinks prices should be lowered for everyone.
<h2>Stock Market Soars As U.S./China Slash Tariffs</h2>
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Topline: Stocks soared Monday after the United States and China formally agreed to a temporary trade deal that will dramatically lower tariffs across the board.
After formal negotiations in Switzerland last weekend, China agreed to cut tariffs on American imports from 125% to just 10%, while the United States will cut rates from 145% to 10%. Beijing also agreed to eliminate or suspend non-tariff countermeasures against the United States, which means that their ban on rare earth mineral exports could come to an end.
&#8220;Yesterday, we achieved a total reset with China,” President Trump <a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1921928176286020061">said</a> on Monday. “After productive talks in Geneva, both sides now agree to reduce the tariffs imposed after April 2nd to 10% for 90 days as negotiators continue on the largest structural issues.&#8221;
This deal is a stunning reversal of hostilities — ahead of last weekend’s meetings, for example, even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent seemed to think a deal was a long way off, saying his goal was “de-escalation… not a big trade deal.”
Clearly, the Chinese were more willing to negotiate than many expected — Beijing signed on to a joint statement that referenced a “spirit of mutual opening, continued communication, cooperation, and mutual respect.” That’s quite a different message than we heard last month, when the Chinese were calling the U.S. bullies who would be made to pay. As more proof of the improvement in relations, the two sides also agreed to establish a formal process for streamlined trade talks in the future, including using a third country as a mediator.
However: The Trump administration has made clear that while it is willing to open up the flow of certain Chinese goods, it wants to break U.S. reliance on essential imports like weapons, technology, and pharmaceuticals.
“The United States will continue a strategic rebalancing in many areas that were exposed as supply chain weaknesses during COVID,” Secretary Bessent <a href="https://x.com/CookedGooseinFL/status/1921880651646611609">said</a> on Monday. “Whether it’s medicines, whether it’s semi-conductors, steel … we will continue moving towards U.S. independence or reliable supplies from allies.”
Following news of the deal, the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped more than 1000 points, the S&amp;P 500 rose more than 3%, erasing all its losses from last month, and the NASDAQ shot up more than 4%, marking a 20% increase from its recent low in April.
<h2>&#8220;Flying Palace&#8221; To Replace Air Force One?</h2>
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-919345" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/SEGMENT-HEADERS.00_02_33_26.Still003.jpeg" alt="" width="640" height="360" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/SEGMENT-HEADERS.00_02_33_26.Still003.jpeg 640w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/SEGMENT-HEADERS.00_02_33_26.Still003-300x169.jpeg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></div>
Topline: Trump is off to the Middle East this week for what the White House promises to be a trip of dealmaking and diplomacy. But the president’s trip is off to a controversial start thanks to a story about a $400 million Qatari airplane.
On Sunday, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-poised-accept-palace-sky-gift-trump/story?id=121680511">ABC News</a> reported that the Qatari royal family planned to give Trump a $400 million super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet described as a “floating palace.” The plane would reportedly be available for Trump to use in lieu of Air Force One by the end of his term, and then – according to some initial reports – transferred to his presidential library. Trump says it’s merely the Qataris helping the United States replace Air Force One, which is 40 years old, and, according to Trump, in need of some serious upgrades. Speaking to reporters before departing for the Middle East yesterday, Trump said the Qataris knew Boeing had delayed production of the new jet he wanted, and stepped in to help.
“I think that was a very nice gesture,” the president <a href="https://x.com/factpostnews/status/1921942334930907441">said</a>. &#8220;Now, I could be a stupid person and say &#8216;Oh no, we don’t want a free plane&#8217; … I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer.”
However, not everyone sees this as just a goodwill gesture. Qatar is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and uses its wealth to gain influence in the United States – and many, many other countries. It frequently invites politicians on luxurious, state-funded junkets to the Middle East. But that influence-buying sparks suspicion, because Qatar also uses its oil money to bankroll Hamas terrorists and Middle Eastern news powerhouse Al Jazeera. The country has also been accused of a lengthy list of human rights violations, so any collaboration with the Qataris is bound to raise some eyebrows.
Notable MAGA loyalists, including pro-Trump activist Laura Loomer, were quick to <a href="https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1921615017138618439">condemn</a> the decision, warning that accepting the plane was bad optics at best, and a security risk at worst. Trump, for his part, is staying on the offensive, calling accusations of conflict of interest “fake news.”
Qatar’s media attaché to the United States has been making the rounds since the ABC story broke, telling reporters that the aircraft transfer would only be used temporarily, and that nothing has been finalized yet.

MorningWire-0428-2

Morning Brief: Qatar Force One And Trump’s ‘Consequential’ Drug Price Plan

Communist China

Media

Morning Wire

Politics

Qatar

President Donald Trump on Monday morning signed an executive order to significantly reduce pharmaceutical drug prices for Americans.
The directive, Trump stressed, will bring fairness to Americans and cut out &#8220;the middlemen&#8221; to bring prices down so citizens will start to pay prices comparable to other developed nations.
&#8220;Starting today, the United States will no longer subsidize the drug prices of other countries,&#8221; the president said. &#8220;We&#8217;ve been subsidizing drug prices for the rest of the world, not just the European Union.&#8221;
By implementing a policy called &#8220;Most Favored Nation,” Trump said the U.S. is &#8220;gonna pay the lowest price there is in the world. We&#8217;re no longer paying ten times more than another country.&#8221;
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was with Trump at a press conference on Monday morning, said that other nations, particularly those in the European Union, must chip in for research and development. Kennedy said raising their prices by just 20% would dramatically reduce costs in the United States.
Trump teased the executive order Sunday night on Truth Social, saying it would reduce prices by up to 80%.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
JUST IN: PRESIDENT TRUMP&#8217;S &#8220;MOST IMPORTANT AND IMPACTFUL&#8221; TRUTH EVER ISSUED ⬇️
&#8220;I am pleased to announce that Tomorrow morning, in the White House, at 9:00 A.M., I will be signing one of the most consequential Executive Orders in our Country’s history&#8230;.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/YfyKzked0S">pic.twitter.com/YfyKzked0S</a>
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) <a href="https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1921695676032856313?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 11, 2025</a></blockquote>
During Trump&#8217;s first term, he introduced a regulation for certain cancer drugs and others to be the same price as they were abroad. The Biden administration, however, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-says-he-will-sign-executive-order-aimed-at-lowering-drug-prices-2a5b9b28" target="_blank" rel="noopener">abandoned</a> the regulation after a court struck it down on procedural grounds.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt discussed the order on Monday, saying online that other presidents &#8220;merely talked about addressing this problem – but President Trump is taking bold action to finally solve it and deliver a good deal for American families and seniors.&#8221;
&#8220;President Trump is signing a historic Executive Order to significantly reduce drug prices for Americans,&#8221; she posted on X. &#8220;This EO will help bypass costly middlemen and bring the prices Americans pay for prescription drugs in line with those paid by other nations.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
President Trump is signing a historic Executive Order to significantly reduce drug prices for Americans.
This EO will help bypass costly middlemen and bring the prices Americans pay for prescription drugs in line with those paid by other nations.
Other Presidents merely talked… <a href="https://t.co/KTD37JonpH">pic.twitter.com/KTD37JonpH</a>
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) <a href="https://twitter.com/PressSec/status/1921907172528607564?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 12, 2025</a></blockquote>
White House Health Policy Adviser Calley Means, the brother of surgeon general nominee Casey Means, promoted the order online, posting on X, &#8220;The U.S. is less than 5% of the world’s population but produces 75% of worldwide pharma profits. That’s not the free market. It&#8217;s rank corporate capture.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
The U.S. is less than 5% of the world’s population but produces 75% of worldwide pharma profits.
That’s not the free market. Its rank corporate capture.
— Calley Means (@calleymeans) <a href="https://twitter.com/calleymeans/status/1921923593090248806?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 12, 2025</a></blockquote>
&#8220;&#8216;Price controls&#8217; would assume we have a free market in healthcare. It is not a free market when America, the largest purchaser of drugs in the world, pays 10 more for major drugs from American companies than Germany,&#8221; Means commented, responding to criticism of the order. &#8220;That’s corruption.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
“Price controls” would assume we have a free market in healthcare.
It is not a free market when America, the largest purchaser of drugs in the world, pays 10 more for major drugs from American companies than Germany.
That’s corruption.
— Calley Means (@calleymeans) <a href="https://twitter.com/calleymeans/status/1921901461132243425?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 12, 2025</a></blockquote>
The order follows another directive signed by Trump on May 5, which seeks to reduce the regulatory burden on the domestic production of critical medicines.
&#8220;One key area of concern is the length of time it takes to build pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities in the United States today,&#8221; the order <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/regulatory-relief-to-promote-domestic-production-of-critical-medicines/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reads</a>. &#8220;New construction must navigate myriad Federal, State, and local requirements ranging from building standards and zoning restrictions to environmental protocols that together diminish the certainty needed to generate investment for large manufacturing projects.&#8221;
The order notes that estimates suggest building new pharmaceutical manufacturing plants &#8220;may take as long as 5 to 10 years, which is unacceptable from a national security standpoint.&#8221;
Within 180 days, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will take action to &#8220;update regulations and guidance that apply to the inspection and approval of new and expanded manufacturing capacity of pharmaceutical products, active pharmaceutical ingredients, key starting materials, and associated raw materials in the United States to eliminate any duplicative or unnecessary requirements and maximize the timeliness and predictability of agency review,&#8221; the order notes.

Trump Signs Order To Reduce Drug Prices, Tells Rest Of World To Pay Up

Trump Signs Order To Dramatically Reduce Drug Prices, Tells Rest Of World To Pay Up

Business

Executive

Health

Prices

President Donald Trump said Sunday he will sign an executive order that will reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals “almost immediately by 30% to 80%.”
Trump announced the move in a post on Truth Social. The order aims to bring “FAIRNESS TO AMERICA” by lowering drug costs in the United States while raising them throughout the rest of the world.
“Therefore, I am pleased to announce that Tomorrow morning, in the White House, at 9:00 A.M., I will be signing one of the most consequential Executive Orders in our Country’s history,” Trump <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114491534347862682" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>.
“I will be instituting a MOST FAVORED NATION’S POLICY whereby the United States will pay the same price as the Nation that pays the lowest price anywhere in the World,” he said. “Our Country will finally be treated fairly, and our citizens Healthcare Costs will be reduced by numbers never even thought of before. Additionally, on top of everything else, the United States will save TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS.”
The plan to link the cost of drugs in the United States to the cost of drugs in foreign countries comes after the president announced last month that he plans to enact “major” tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
“We’re going to tariff our pharmaceuticals,” Trump <a href="https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/trump-major-tariffs-pharmaceuticals-coming-europe/744829/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> the National Republican Congressional Committee. “And once we do that, they’re going to come rushing back into our country because we’re the big market.”
In the United States, drugs are significantly more costly than elsewhere in the world. On average, prices in the United States are ​​2.78 times higher than those seen in 33 other nations, according to a 2024 Rand Corporation <a href="https://www.rand.org/news/press/2024/02/01.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">report</a>.
For brand name drugs, the price difference is even starker: “The gap between prices in the United States and other countries is even larger for brand-named drugs, with U.S. prices averaging 4.22 times those in comparison nations.”
Some of the contributing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/health/us-drug-prices.html">factors</a> to high drug costs in the United States are the lack of transparency in drug prices and the prevalence in foreign countries of having centralized government negotiators haggling over the cost of pharmaceuticals.

Trump Teases ‘Most Consequential Executive Order In Our Country’s History’

Health Care

U.S.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday aimed at slashing out-of-control health care costs by attempting to remove inefficient government practices and encourage more competitive drug pricing.
The executive orders take a wide swath of actions that are intended to improve the Medicare negotiating system, increasing the &#8220;competition for high-cost prescriptions drugs,&#8221; and lowering the cost of insulin for low-income individuals. In a press call attended by The Daily Wire, a White House official said that &#8220;every action&#8221; laid out in the executive order is &#8220;meant to improve the efficiency of drug pricing in the United States.&#8221;
&#8220;My first term included numerous significant actions, including some of the most aggressive in recent history, to deliver lower prescription drug prices to American patients,&#8221; Trump wrote in the executive order. &#8220;The message was clear:  no longer would the executive branch sit idly by as pharmaceutical manufacturers charged patients in our Nation more than those in other countries for the exact same prescription drugs, often made in the exact same places.&#8221;
While House officials said that the executive order was intended to leverage &#8220;current programs to deliver meaningful cost saving.&#8221;
One of the goals of the executive order is to ensure that Medicare is getting the same prices that various providers are paying.
&#8220;Hospitals often get heavily discounted drugs, sometimes it&#8217;s as low as 35% lower, below what Medicare is paying,&#8221; a White House Official said. &#8220;There will be instructions in the EO to do a survey and then contemplate rule-making on how to align Medicare payment with the costs of acquisition.&#8221;
Part of the order includes updating the Medicare drug price negotiation program, and White House officials say they expect to &#8220;eclipse&#8221; savings from the Biden administration during the same time frame. The administration&#8217;s goal is to have 22% savings in the program&#8217;s first year, according to a fact sheet from the White House.
The administration also hopes to standardize Medicare payments for prescription drugs, including cancer treatments, &#8220;regardless of where the treatment is administered,&#8221; the White House said.
The Food and Drug Administration is also directed in the order to &#8220;streamline&#8221; approval of generic drugs and facilitate more importation of drugs from other countries like Canada. The executive order also commissions a report on &#8220;anti-competitive&#8221; behavior from pharmaceutical companies.
Another one of the key provisions of the executive order is resurrecting a program from the first Trump administration that officials say will allow low-income individuals and people without health insurance to get insulin as low as three cents a vial and $15 for injectable epinephrine from qualified providers through the 340b program. This program allows certain health care providers to purchase drugs at significantly reduced rates.
&#8220;What the executive order does is resurrect something that we had pursued last term, which is to ensure that those 340b discounts are being passed through for insulin and epipens to low-income individuals,&#8221; a White House official said on Tuesday. &#8220;I think that many of you are familiar with the fact that in some cases the 340b program, the acquisition cost of things like insulin are literally pennies on the dollar.&#8221;
That 340b program for insulin and epinephrine was <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/06/16/2021-12545/proposed-rescission-of-executive-order-13937-executive-order-on-access-to-affordable-life-saving" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ended</a> by the Biden administration, which argued that it would raise prices for health care providers and &#8220;undue administrative costs.&#8221;
Health care costs have continued to skyrocket and have only worsened since former President Barack Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress passed &#8220;Obamacare.&#8221;

President Trump Meets With Visiting Israeli PM Netanyahu At The White House

Trump Moves To Increase Competition In Pharma, Lower Cost Of Prescription Drugs

Imagine that an executive of a major corporation sits down for dinner at a restaurant. Unbeknownst to him, it&#8217;s a sting operation. Everything he says is being recorded. Very quickly, in order to impress someone he thinks is interested in him, the executive confesses that his company is lying to the American public. In secret, the executive says, they&#8217;re thinking about conducting extremely dangerous medical experiments within the borders of the United States — and these experiments are similar to the ones in Wuhan that led to the COVID pandemic. Then the executive admits that government regulators aren&#8217;t scrutinizing these experiments as much as they should, for the simple reason that they don&#8217;t want to jeopardize their potential future job opportunities at the corporation. And then imagine that, once the executive realizes he&#8217;s on camera and that he&#8217;s just confessed to a fraud on the American public, he begins screaming and crawling on the floor of the restaurant. In his hysteria, he pushes people away, tries to hide his face, and ultimately runs away. He demonstrates a clear consciousness of guilt, in other words.
What do you think the end result of this kind of episode might be? In a rational world, you might expect, at a minimum, that this executive would be fired, and that his company would immediately be investigated — both by the government, and by every media organization in the country. After all, it&#8217;s not every day that a corporate executive admits that his company is working on research that could cause another pandemic. He also just divulged trade secrets on camera, which you&#8217;d think would upset his bosses.
But in reality, none of those things happened. 
The situation I just described took place in early 2023, when Project Veritas secretly filmed a senior official in Pfizer&#8217;s research and development division. You might remember that whole episode. Pfizer came out and denied, essentially, that the executive had meant what he said. As far as we know, the company took no action against him. In the end, Pfizer, needless to say, did not suffer any significant consequences. They remain one of the largest and most profitable corporations on the planet. But incredibly, the people who exposed the Pfizer executive didn&#8217;t fare so well. It was like Pfizer pulled a Reverse Uno card. 
For one thing, Project Veritas did not survive. It collapsed soon afterwards. So did the one show on cable news that covered Project Veritas&#8217; reporting, Fox News&#8217; &#8220;Tucker Carlson Tonight.&#8221; They were taken off the air shortly after covering the Pfizer sting operation, for reasons that remain officially undisclosed. To restate: Less than five months after a Pfizer executive was exposed and humiliated on camera, everyone who talked about the scandal was deplatformed. Meanwhile the executive went back to work.
If you wanted to illustrate the extraordinary power that the pharmaceutical industry has in this country, you&#8217;d be hard pressed to find a better example. One way or another, people who criticize them tend to lose their platforms. That&#8217;s a level of protection that very few other corporations have, regardless of their financial situation. Tesla, for example, is about ten times the size of Pfizer by market cap. And as we all know, they&#8217;re subjected to constant media attacks. So what is it about the pharmaceutical industry, specifically, that makes them so hard to criticize?
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mws-ep-1563-member-exclusive">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
The leading theory, which we&#8217;ve talked about before, is that companies like Pfizer essentially buy off the media. You can&#8217;t watch Fox or CNN or MSNBC without seeing an ad from the pharmaceutical industry. In total, the pharmaceutical industry <a href="https://substack.com/home/post/p-159740117?utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=web" target="_blank" rel="noopener">spends</a> something like $5 billion on advertising every year — which in some years, is <a href="https://marylandmatters.org/2024/01/19/report-finds-some-drug-manufacturers-spend-more-on-advertising-executives-salaries-than-new-research/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">more</a> than they spend on research and development. And a lot of this spending is concentrated on news stations. As the journalist Kyle Becker reported on his Substack, &#8220;Nearly 31% of ad minutes on major nightly news broadcasts in 2024 came from pharmaceutical brands.&#8221; If you watch any amount of cable news, you know that figure is probably accurate. Turn the television on, and you&#8217;ll probably see one of these ads within five minutes. These are among the most lucrative ad purchases — pushing drugs like Ozempic, Skyrizi, &#8220;Vyvgart Hytrulo,&#8221; and so on. Naturally, that kind of spending leads to favorable coverage. Big Pharma doesn&#8217;t even need to establish any kind of quid pro quo, or request anything from the news networks. It&#8217;s just generally understood that, if you&#8217;re working for one of these networks, you should go easy on the pharma giants.
This dynamic is one of the reasons why a lot of people took notice recently, on hearing the news that RFK Jr. and the HHS had supposedly implemented a total ban on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Those reports turned out to be inaccurate, at least for the time being. But RFK Jr. has pledged to implement a similar ban in the past. And he&#8217;s been very clear about his reasoning. While he was campaigning for Trump last year, and while he was leading his own presidential bid, for example, RFK Jr. made the point that pharmaceutical advertising has compromised the news industry. He&#8217;s also said that, in part because of these advertisements, Americans spend far more on prescription drugs than pretty much every other major country. By some estimates we spend more than twice as much.
And it&#8217;s logical to conclude that advertising plays some role in those numbers. When people see an advertisement for a new prescription drug, they&#8217;re more likely to tell their doctor they want it, as opposed to a cheaper generic brand. Keep in mind, only two countries on the planet allow direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising: the United States and New Zealand. The vast majority of the civilized world has rejected this kind of marketing. And one of the obvious consequences of this carve-out for big pharma is that they sell a lot more drugs to people who otherwise wouldn&#8217;t pay for them. They wouldn&#8217;t spend $5 billion a year on advertisements if that weren&#8217;t true. (And this isn&#8217;t even getting into Big Pharma advertisements and solicitations that target physicians and other professionals).
Just to give one example, in 2022, the manufacturer of the drug Skyrizie, AbbVie, spent around $229 million advertising the drug that year. The next year, AbbVie decided to increase its advertising budget for the drug by more than double. And the results were clear: drug sales went up to $7.8 billion, an increase of roughly 50% year-over-year. There was no major FDA approval that occurred in this period. The drug&#8217;s formula didn&#8217;t change in some way. Instead, more people heard about it, so more people asked their doctors for it. And by the way, the vast majority of the $7.8 billion came from customers in the United States, because they&#8217;re pretty much the only people seeing the advertisements.
This advertising exemption, of course, is just one of several carve-outs that Big Pharma enjoys in this country. It&#8217;s also nearly impossible to sue them when one of their vaccines ends up hurting or killing you, thanks to a federal law passed three decades ago. But the advertising carve-out is one of the most important ones, because it has a lot of downstream effects that aren&#8217;t immediately obvious. One of those effects is that the ads increase the price of the drugs. When billions of dollars are spent on advertising, inevitably that cost will be passed on to the consumers. This is basic economics and common sense, and doctors see it everyday. As far back as a decade ago — when direct-to-consumer advertising was much less common than it is today — the American Medical Association noticed the problem. They voted to ban all direct-to-consumer advertising.
The chair of the AMA, a woman named Patrice Harris, announced that, “Today’s vote in support of an advertising ban reflects concerns among physicians about the negative impact of commercially-driven promotions, and the role that marketing costs play in fueling escalating drug prices. Direct-to-consumer advertising also inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate.”
It&#8217;s true that, by law, these advertisements have to list all of the potential side effects. Invariably, they rattle them off at the end of the commercial, and they do it so quickly that you can&#8217;t really tell what&#8217;s happening in some cases. Pretty much everyone ignores these disclaimers at this point, because they all end up sounding like a bizarre list of horrible afflictions, always ending in death or paralysis or something catastrophic. You can watch an ad for Claritin and they&#8217;ll tell you that the side effects could include getting hit by a train or something. It&#8217;s almost as if the drugmakers have trained us to become numb to all of these potential side effects, and to think they&#8217;re all extremely rare and unlikely to occur.
<h3><a href="https://www.amiracist.com/?_gl=1*jtghwp*_gcl_au*ODQ1NjYzNTg2LjE3Mjg5MDk3OTE.*_ga*MTc2NzM0NDQ2NS4xNzI4OTA5Nzkx*_ga_CZKR9ZYKJP*MTczMDEyMDgwOS40OS4xLjE3MzAxMjA4MzkuMzAuMC4w" target="_blank" rel="noopener">MATT WALSH&#8217;S &#8216;AM I RACIST?&#8217; NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+</a></h3>
That&#8217;s because, even with the often comically long disclaimer at the end of these drug commercials, the ads still don&#8217;t do enough to emphasize the potential side effects and dangers of the drugs. They don&#8217;t discuss the relative risk of every side effect, or how common they are, for example. And that makes sense because ads — regardless of who&#8217;s making them — are meant to manipulate and create an emotional response in a very short period of time. That&#8217;s fine when you&#8217;re selling cars or clothing or whatever. But it just shouldn&#8217;t be the way medical treatments are presented to the public. People should consult with professionals when they&#8217;re seeking these treatments, instead of watching paid actors sing a song about it.
But pharmaceutical ads, by design, short-circuit this process. They allow Big Pharma companies to sell the disease, not just the cure. They convince people that they have such-and-such a disorder and enlist them to go to their doctor and request the drug to treat it. This is totally backwards. You&#8217;re supposed to go to the doctor with your symptoms, not with a wishlist of drugs you want to receive. Pharma ads have helped to turn doctors into glorified drug dealers. About a dozen studies bear this out. Patients who go to the doctor and say &#8220;I saw an ad for Paxlovid&#8221; or &#8220;I saw an ad for Prozac&#8221; are a lot more likely to get that drug, than a patient who simply presents with depression-related symptoms. And on top of that, these advertisements have also contributed to the perception that, whatever problem you might have — whether it&#8217;s depression, or &#8220;feeling like you&#8217;re in the wrong body,&#8221; or whatever — that a drug from Big Pharma can be the solution. As we&#8217;ve discussed, this is a sentiment that has ruined the lives of thousands of people, including children.
Part of the reason this perception has been allowed to fester, as Liz Wheeler pointed out the other day, is that there&#8217;s no critical reporting on Big Pharma in the mainstream press. The pharmaceutical industry is allowed to buy billions of dollars&#8217; worth of advertising, which presents them as the solution to everyone&#8217;s problems. And then the press — along with many scientific institutions that also receive money from Big Pharma— don&#8217;t have any incentive to contradict the narrative. If and when HHS does ban these advertisements, then suddenly, that incentive will reappear. Very quickly, corporate media will fail, because they&#8217;ll be deprived of most of their advertising revenue. And in their place will be a slew of investigations by actual journalists into the various grotesque abuses of power by the medical establishment in recent years — on everything from gender ideology to the COVID shot.
As of right now, again, it appears that the reports were wrong about an imminent ban on these direct-to-consumer advertisements. But there are reasons to think that RFK Jr. and HHS are still planning to implement one. If that comes to pass — and there are indicators it will — then it would inevitably set up a major legal battle between Big Pharma and the federal government on First Amendment grounds. They will claim that they have the constitutional right to flood the airwaves with sales pitches for extremely potent medications that could ruin your life. But they don&#8217;t have that right, any more than the local drug dealer does. If RFK Jr. can win this fight, then in one fell swoop, he will destroy the corporate press, save billions of dollars for Americans, and usher in a new era of skepticism for an industry that badly needs it. He would be the single most consequential HHS secretary in the history of this country. All he needs to do is what pretty much every country in the world is already doing, which is to tell Big Pharma to get off our televisions.

Ozempic, Victoza and Wegovy, injectable prescription weight loss medicines.

All The Reasons Why Big Pharma Commercials Should Be Banned

advertising

Department of Health and Human Services

Doctors

Drugs

Matt Walsh

Ozempic

Pfizer

Project Veritas

Imagine we&#8217;re back in the late 1980s or early 1990s. You&#8217;re feeling depressed and no one wants to talk to you, so you pay a psychiatrist to listen to your problems. But even after talking things out with your shrink, you&#8217;re still not feeling great. All hope seems lost. Then the shrink tells you not to despair, because you have the opportunity to participate in a clinical trial for a new class of drug that has the potential to cure all of your symptoms, called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs.
If you enter the trial, you have a chance of getting the new SSRI drug, or you could get a placebo that does nothing. You&#8217;re told it&#8217;s a win-win: If you participate in the clinical trial, Big Pharma will get some more data on whether this new class of drugs actually works. And you have a chance of being cured. If you&#8217;re not cured, then in all likelihood, the worst-case scenario isn&#8217;t a big deal. Either you get a placebo and nothing changes, or you get the real drug, which has relatively modest side effects — like dry mouth, nausea, dizziness, and so on. And in exchange for enduring those side effects, your depression might go away. So what do you have to lose?
This was the process drug companies used to convince the world that SSRIs worked. After running a bunch of &#8220;double-blind&#8221; clinical trials, they found that people who took the SSRIs ultimately reported that they felt better than people who received the placebo. Therefore, we were told that the whole &#8220;serotonin theory of depression&#8221; must be true. After all, when people took SSRIs and had more serotonin in their brains, their depression went away. The people who took the sugar pill didn&#8217;t do as well. So there you have it. Science wins again.
There&#8217;s a major problem with this whole methodology, however. It&#8217;s a problem that somehow didn&#8217;t occur to any of the media outlets or physicians who pushed SSRIs for decades. You might have to think about it for a few minutes, but eventually it becomes obvious. Here&#8217;s the issue: In practice, these clinical trials weren&#8217;t actually double-blind. The vast majority of patients were able to &#8220;break blind,&#8221; as they say in the industry. And that means they were able to figure out whether they got the real SSRI or the placebo. That&#8217;s because, in most cases, the patients who got the real drug very quickly noticed they were experiencing some of the side effects. After all, if you take a pill and you start experiencing dry mouth or nausea or something like that, then you&#8217;ll probably conclude that you&#8217;re taking an active medication. And that&#8217;s exactly what happened in many of these trials. In fact, in one study, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4172306/#c25" target="_blank" rel="noopener">conducted</a> by researchers at Columbia, 89% of participants correctly guessed that they were on the SSRI. That&#8217;s an extremely high number for a clinical trial.
Now you can probably see the issue. If the studies aren&#8217;t really double-blind, then we have no way of knowing if the SSRIs actually improved people&#8217;s moods. It&#8217;s quite possible that these patients were actually feeling better because they thought they were taking a wonder drug. And then they convinced themselves that it was working, so they told the therapist they were improving. This is commonly referred to as the &#8220;placebo effect,&#8221; and the only way to defeat it — particularly when you&#8217;re trying to assess the effectiveness of psychoactive drugs — is with double-blind studies. And that didn&#8217;t happen with SSRIs.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1539-the-matt-walsh-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
This is not some crackpot theory, by the way. A few years ago, a researcher at Harvard named Irving Kirsch <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4172306/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">found:</a>
<blockquote>Analysis of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect &#8230; The relatively small differences between drug and placebo in antidepressant trials are at least in part due to &#8216;breaking blind&#8217; and discerning that one is in the drug group, because of the side effects produced by the drug.</blockquote>
Kirsch goes on to suggest that, instead of SSRIs, maybe all patients should be given a placebo. After all, based on the FDA&#8217;s data, less than 45% of SSRI trials showed a statistically significant benefit of the SSRI over a placebo. And the placebo, of course, has no side effects.
But as we all know, there&#8217;s no money in prescribing sugar pills. So instead, doctors and the pharmaceutical industry pushed SSRIs. Based on these garbage clinical trials — which fall apart under the slimmest possible scrutiny — the use of SSRIs among teenagers and adults in this country increased by almost 400% from the early 1990&#8217;s to 2006. And it kept going up. By 2014, one in ten adults was filling an SSRI prescription. From 2015 to 2021, SSRI use increased by another 35%. We&#8217;re talking about tens of millions of prescriptions here.
Meanwhile, the number of Americans suffering from depression has kept increasing. According to Gallup, in 2023, &#8220;The percentage of U.S. adults who report having been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime reached 29.0%, nearly 10 percentage points higher than in 2015.&#8221; In other words, we&#8217;re more depressed than ever, and at the same time, we&#8217;re taking more antidepressants than ever.
These prescriptions have continued even after one of the most prominent medical journals on the planet admitted that actually, doctors no longer think low serotonin levels are linked to depression. In other words, if these drugs actually work, then no one can actually explain why. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Quoting</a> from the journal Molecular Psychiatry: &#8220;Our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity. Most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without. &#8230; This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression.&#8221;
I&#8217;ll say that again. &#8220;This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression.&#8221; This was a paper published in the summer of 2022, by one of the top journals in the entire field of medicine. No serious person disputes it.
And yet, to this day, if you suggest that depression isn&#8217;t related to a chemical imbalance, as I did this week, you will be dogpiled for doing so. It’s been impossible to have anything approaching an honest conversation about depression and SSRIs because many of the people on these drugs will lash out with blind rage if you even suggest that depression might have causes that go deeper than “chemical imbalances.” If you try to talk about the problem of despair with any depth or nuance at all, you are screamed out of the room by drug addicts who don’t know they’re drug addicts. The truth is, though, that none of the support for SSRIs is based in reality. This whole class of drugs has been peddled to tens of millions of people based on complete fabrications. It&#8217;s not an overstatement to say that this is one of the great medical scandals of our time.
What&#8217;s changing now is that, finally, someone in a position of authority is finally willing to investigate these drugs — and many other drugs like them. A few days ago, via executive order, the Trump administration established something called the &#8220;Make America Healthy Again Commission,&#8221; or &#8220;MAHA,&#8221; and it&#8217;ll be headed by RFK Jr. The purpose of the commission, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/establishing-the-presidents-make-america-healthy-again-commission/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according</a> to the White House, is to determine why Americans have shorter life expectancies than people living in other nations — as well as higher rates of chronic diseases like cancer and asthma. Part of this effort means assessing the, &#8220;prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.&#8221; Watch:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
HHS Secretary RFK Jr. pledges “NOTHING is gonna be off limits” in chronic disease investigation
“The childhood vaccine schedule, electromagnetic radiation, glyphosate, other pesticides, ultra processed foods, artificial food additives, SSRI and other psychiatric drugs, PFAs,… <a href="https://t.co/kWV2LHuqTG">pic.twitter.com/kWV2LHuqTG</a>
&mdash; Holden Culotta (@Holden_Culotta) <a href="https://twitter.com/Holden_Culotta/status/1891888695185375248?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 18, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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As of right now, as you heard, RFK&#8217;s commission is going to be focused on gathering data. They&#8217;re not banning anything outright. They&#8217;re not punishing doctors for prescribing anything. Instead, they&#8217;re doing what the government should&#8217;ve done several decades ago. They&#8217;re looking at the existing evidence and determining whether it&#8217;s valid or not. They&#8217;re not going to simply accept &#8220;clinical trials&#8221; without looking closely at them. They&#8217;re going to see whether it makes sense to keep prescribing these drugs to so many Americans, particularly young people.
You have to wonder what kind of person would object to a fact-finding effort like this. After all, if SSRIs (and the other drugs he mentioned) actually work as advertised, then the extra scrutiny wouldn&#8217;t be a problem at all. But RFK Jr. has received a lot of push back already. Newsweek, for example, recently took aim at RFK&#8217;s claim that antidepressants can be more addictive than heroin. They cited a Stanford professor as <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/rfk-jr-antidepressants-ssris-drugs-maha-2032297" target="_blank" rel="noopener">saying</a>: &#8220;Antidepressants and heroin are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk. In my 35 years in the addiction field, I&#8217;ve met only two or three people who thought they were addicted to antidepressants versus thousands who were addicted to heroin and other opioids.&#8221;
So we&#8217;re meant to conclude that RFK is a conspiracy theorist for even suggesting that SSRIs can cause dependency. Just a few years ago, however, that was not a conspiracy theory at all. It was settled science. In 2018, the New York Times published an article entitled, &#8220;Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit.&#8221; Here&#8217;s some of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/health/antidepressants-withdrawal-prozac-cymbalta.html?rsrc=ss&amp;unlocked_article_code=1.s04.GyfR.MCfR9TrwZ4dZ&amp;smid=nytcore-ios-share&amp;referringSource=articleShare" target="_blank" rel="noopener">relevant findings</a>: &#8220;In New Zealand, where prescriptions are at historic highs, a survey of long-term users found that withdrawal was the most common complaint, cited by three-quarters of long-term users. &#8230; In a recent survey of 250 long-term users of psychiatric drugs — most commonly antidepressants — about half who wound down their prescriptions rated the withdrawal as severe. Nearly half who tried to quit could not do so because of these symptoms. In another study of 180 longtime antidepressant users, withdrawal symptoms were reported by more than 130. Almost half said they felt addicted to antidepressants.&#8221;
Now, if you compare those numbers to the percentage of heroin users who become addicted within a month of using the drug, you&#8217;ll find that RFK actually has a point. By one <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2681168" target="_blank" rel="noopener">estimate</a>, up to 38% of new heroin users become dependent within a year. That&#8217;s a lot, obviously, but it&#8217;s less than the number of antidepressant users who reported feeling severe withdrawal symptoms.
This is why RFK&#8217;s commission is an important step. It&#8217;s clear we have a lot of evidence that antidepressants are causing far more harm than most people realize. But they&#8217;re not seeing the evidence because it&#8217;s being suppressed. A transparent commission can solve that problem. It can also address this objection, which was <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/kennedy-rfk-antidepressants-ssri-school-shootings/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">just published</a> by the Left-wing outlet Mother Jones.: &#8220;In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, [RFK] claimed that &#8216;tremendous circumstantial evidence&#8217; suggested people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.).&#8221;
This is another common refrain you hear from defenders of SSRIs. They say &#8220;most school shooters&#8221; were not taking SSRIs. As we&#8217;ve previously discussed, there are two major problems with this line. First of all, we don&#8217;t know what drugs a school shooter was taking unless the family discloses it. The police and hospitals won&#8217;t tell anyone, citing privacy laws. And in pretty much no case does the family definitely state that the shooter wasn&#8217;t taking any kind of medication. Secondly, a lot of &#8220;mass shootings&#8221; are really gang violence, and those incidents get lumped in with school shootings. So they flood the data set, and make it hard to determine whether SSRIs are influencing a certain kind of shooting.
Anecdotally, of course, you&#8217;ll find plenty of evidence that SSRIs might be linked to school shootings. From Columbine to Northern Illinois University to the Navy Yard to the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, to the black church in Charleston to the Old National Bank in Kentucky, the shooters were all confirmed to be on antidepressants. In response to these shootings, you might say that correlation doesn&#8217;t prove causation. After all, these shooters were taking SSRIs because they were unstable. That doesn&#8217;t necessarily prove SSRIs made their condition worse.
And that&#8217;s true. But there is additional, affirmative evidence to believe that SSRIs are in fact making these shooters&#8217; condition worse. For one thing, there&#8217;s the FDA black box label on these drugs, which indicates that they can &#8220;increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior.&#8221; And then there&#8217;s this. A few years ago, researchers writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5066537/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">found</a> that antidepressants doubled the risk of suicidality and violence, when they&#8217;re given to healthy people with no mental health disorders. From the journal: &#8220;Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence.&#8221;
How is that possible? The truth is we have no idea. We have no clue why these drugs supposedly work in the first place. And we have no idea why they might turn normal people into violent maniacs. It&#8217;s obviously a very concerning finding, especially given how much doctors are over-prescribing these drugs to any patient who claims to be depressed.
Doctors would rather prescribe those drugs than tell patients the truth about their depression, and how to deal with it. I can say that, in my personal life, I have known many people who take antidepressants. And in almost every case, there are glaringly obvious things in their lives that would cause any normal person to be depressed. Depression is a totally rational response to their circumstance. Instead of making lifestyle changes or dealing with the underlying trauma, however, they are given drugs that effectively numb their brain. It’s like giving someone a painkiller to make it hurt less when they put their hand on a hot stove. The stove is still burning them. The pain from the stove is not the problem. Their hands and nervous system work just fine. It’s where they’re putting their hand, that’s the problem.
The reason the medical establishment and Democrats are panicking over RFK&#8217;s commission is simple. The moment people realize they have agency — when they realize they can take their hand off the stove — they become a lot harder to control. They also become a lot harder to monetize. For Big Pharma and corporate media outlets that sell advertising space to Big Pharma, the implications are obviously dire. Nevertheless, for Americans hoping to reverse this country&#8217;s long-standing public health decline, after a generation of junk science and fake clinical trials, it&#8217;s a change that&#8217;s long overdue.

Secretary Of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Visits “The Ingraham Angle”

Democrats Enter Panic Mode As RFK Sets Out To Make America Healthy Again

Depression

Science

If you weren’t paying close attention on Super Bowl Sunday, you might have missed the <a href="https://x.com/wearehims/status/1888774632955691247" target="_blank" rel="noopener">commercial</a> from telehealth company Hims and Hers that has generated some online controversy. 
In the ad, the company correctly points out the “deadliest epidemic” facing Americans: obesity. Hims and Hers nailed it on the head with its description of the weight loss industry’s failure to keep Americans healthy, but despite the convincing and emotional message of the ad, it still missed the point when its solution was just more medications. 
Instead of pushing a healthy lifestyle, Hims and Hers advertised a compounded semaglutide, which is basically just a substitute for Ozempic. In 2023, the FDA received numerous <a href="https://www.fda.gov/drugs/postmarket-drug-safety-information-patients-and-providers/fdas-concerns-unapproved-glp-1-drugs-used-weight-loss" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reports</a> of adverse effects after people used compounded semaglutide. Of course, the Hims and Hers ad didn’t mention this, and sadly, many health care providers lead people to believe that major health issues, such as obesity, can be cured with another medication, another injectable, or another prescription. 
That’s not what will give you true health. 
True health comes from a lifestyle that prioritizes your body’s needs every day, not some quick-fix scheme to magically make you feel better. Taking care of your health is hard work, but it’s possible, and Responsible Man is here to help you take charge of your body, not to turn your body over to some medication. 
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While health care giants want you to rely on their products, at Responsible Man, we want you free. See how the Emerson Multivitamin can help you take charge of your health. 
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. 
Responsible Man shares common ownership with The Daily Wire.

Obesity

Health Care Giant’s Super Bowl Ad Correctly Calls Out Obesity Epidemic But Misses The Solution

Super Bowl

Sen. <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/bernie-sanders" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bernie Sanders</a> (I-VT) erupted during a heated exchange with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the U.S. Senate on Thursday after RFK accused him of being corrupt.
The exchange happened during the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee&#8217;s hearing to consider the nomination of Kennedy to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
“If we want to make America healthy, will you assure the American people that you will fight to do what every other major country on earth does—guarantee healthcare to every single American?” Sanders asked.
“I’m going to make America healthier than any other country in the world right now,” Kennedy responded.
“Will you guarantee to do what every other major country is?&#8221; Sanders interrupted him. &#8220;It’s a simple question, Bobby.”
Kennedy fired back: “The problem of corruption is not just in the federal agencies, it’s in Congress, too. Almost all the members of this panel are accepting, including yourself, millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry to protect their interests.”
&#8220;Oh no, no, no! No, no, no,&#8221; Sanders responded. &#8220;I ran for president like you. I got millions and millions of contributions. They did not come from the executives. Not one nickel of PAC money from the pharmaceutical industry. They came from workers.&#8221;
“In 2020, you were the single largest recipient of pharmaceutical dollars,&#8221; Kennedy responded.
WATCH:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Bernie Erupts After RFK Jr. Accuses Him Of Being ‘Single Largest Receiver Of Pharmaceutical Money’" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DJ-BmvonQDU?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Senate Holds Confirmation Hearings For HHS Secretary Nominee Robert Kennedy

WATCH: Bernie Sanders Erupts After RFK Jr. Accuses Him Of Corruption

Bernie Sanders

Congress

There&#8217;s a civil trial going on right now in the state of California that hasn&#8217;t gotten much attention at all. For the most part, the corporate press doesn&#8217;t want to talk about it, probably because it would upset some of their biggest advertisers. But if you have any interest in learning more about how the alleged &#8220;science&#8221; concerning vaccines actually works in this country, it&#8217;s one of the most important cases that&#8217;s ever been tried.
I&#8217;m talking about a product liability lawsuit that&#8217;s underway against the pharmaceutical giant Merck. The litigation relates to allegations that Merck concealed serious side effects of its &#8220;Gardasil&#8221; vaccine, which promised to protect people from getting HPV — a virus that can lead to cervical cancer in women. Merck of course denies the allegations, and the jury hasn&#8217;t returned a verdict yet.
But even without a verdict, the fact that this case has made it to trial, in and of itself, is worth talking about. Concerns about the Gardasil vaccine have been widespread for nearly two decades, since it was first introduced to the market. Here for example are two news clips from 2008 and 2009, related to the first version of the vaccine. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="001 HPV Vaccine Risks" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NVKr59WovsA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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Put aside for a second whether Gardasil was indeed dangerous, or whether Merck lied in its advertising. Those are questions that I don&#8217;t pretend to be an authority on. That&#8217;s for a jury to decide. The really interesting question is why it took until 2025 for anyone to resolve, definitively, the question of whether this vaccine is actually as safe as advertised. The fact that the judge has allowed this case to go to trial means the allegations, at a minimum, probably aren&#8217;t frivolous. So how was this vaccine — which has been taken by countless people — allowed to escape this kind of serious scrutiny for so long? 
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mws-ep-1526-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
That fact alone — the existence of an information blackout on such an important vaccine — is of course just one of many harrowing, unexplained failures of the public health establishment in this country. If you pull up one of the complaints against Merck, which was filed by the law firm Wisner Baum, you&#8217;ll find a lot of other very disturbing allegations too. One woman, the main plaintiff in the case, alleges she&#8217;s been confined to a wheelchair since the age of 16 because of the vaccine. 
There are also allegations that Merck paid doctors and nonprofits thousands of dollars to promote the vaccine, as well as claims that Merck lied about the vaccine&#8217;s contents. Normally, allegations like this never see the inside of a courthouse, because the pharmaceutical industry enjoys a broad liability shield. This case is a rare exception.
I mention the lawsuit over the Gardasil vaccine because it came up yesterday during the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump&#8217;s nominee to be the next HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. That&#8217;s because RFK Jr. worked with the law firm that brought the case against Merck, and he stands to benefit financially from the outcome. In other words, RFK Jr. played a role in finding the plaintiffs for this very rare, and very important lawsuit that&#8217;s currently in progress against Big Pharma. Here&#8217;s how Elizabeth Warren questioned Kennedy about it. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 Elizabeth Warren" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TFGwrLnEmSk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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What&#8217;s extraordinary about this moment is that Warren has built her entire career around the lie that she&#8217;s a populist — or at least, someone who&#8217;s extremely skeptical of entrenched corporate power, particularly when it&#8217;s held by banks. But in this case, Warren is pretty much indistinguishable from a lawyer for Big Pharma. She&#8217;s berating RFK Jr. because he took Big Pharma to court over the HPV vaccine. And even though he&#8217;s stated that he won&#8217;t pursue any lawsuits while he&#8217;s in government, it&#8217;s not enough for her. She wants him to commit to renouncing lawsuits that he&#8217;s already participated in, or that he might pursue after leaving office. And he wouldn&#8217;t agree to that.
I&#8217;m not going to speculate on Warren&#8217;s motivations. You can point to various campaign contributions she&#8217;s received from the pharmaceutical industry, as many people already have. Actually, on second thought, I am speculating that Elizabeth Warren is a bought and paid for shill for Big Pharma. Not speculating but outright accusing her of it. Still the truth is, this is a much larger problem than Elizabeth Warren. Throughout the hearing, RFK Jr. was repeatedly attacked by Democrats simply for questioning the safety and efficacy of various drugs that are widely prescribed. These are drugs we&#8217;re assured are effective, even though there are very real reasons to doubt that. And in particular, Kennedy was hit over his skepticism of SSRIs, in the most unfair and disingenuous way imaginable. Here&#8217;s Tina Smith of Minnesota, in one of the most egregious moments from this hearing:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="003 Smith spars with RFK" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XrPX7fhzUFQ?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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RFK&#8217;s response at the end of that clip is obviously the right one. Remember the 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine? The shooter killed 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar. We still don&#8217;t know what, if any, drugs he was taking at the time of the incident.
The same is true of the trans-identifying mass shooter here in Tennessee. The Tennessee Star has reported, citing a search warrant, that Vanderbilt had prescribed SSRIs to the shooter. But we don&#8217;t know if the shooter was actively taking those medications, because neither the police nor Vanderbilt will tell us. And therefore, it wouldn&#8217;t show up in any &#8220;studies&#8221; that purport to show how many mass shooters were on SSRIs.
This is the norm, when it comes to these academic papers on SSRIs. And as I&#8217;ve <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YPzTZJubSc" target="_blank" rel="noopener">previously discussed</a>, there&#8217;s another way that these &#8220;studies&#8221; hide the number of mass shooters who are on SSRIs. Basically, they include inner city violence in their tally of mass shootings. So if a bunch of gang members in the South Side of Chicago shoot up a birthday party or something, that gets added to the tally of mass shootings. And because those kinds of shootings happen every day in places like Chicago — for reasons that have nothing to do with SSRIs, like turf disputes and so on — the authors of these studies can make it seem like SSRIs don&#8217;t cause mass shootings. But they&#8217;re really just obfuscating the central question by flooding the data set with unrelated shootings. The core question — which is whether SSRIs cause otherwise law-abiding young students to shoot their classmates — remains unresolved in medical literature.
It’s not surprise and no secret that young angry males who grow up in the hood with no father figures and get involved in gangs and drug dealing by the age of 12 would turn to violence. There’s no mystery there. But there is a mystery as to why a child who has never been violent, who was not raised by a street gang, who is financially stable, would one day casually execute a dozen classmates for no reason that he can even articulate. Why is that happening? And why is it that so often these kids are on psychiatric medication?
<h3><a href="https://www.amiracist.com/?_gl=1*jtghwp*_gcl_au*ODQ1NjYzNTg2LjE3Mjg5MDk3OTE.*_ga*MTc2NzM0NDQ2NS4xNzI4OTA5Nzkx*_ga_CZKR9ZYKJP*MTczMDEyMDgwOS40OS4xLjE3MzAxMjA4MzkuMzAuMC4w" target="_blank" rel="noopener">MATT WALSH&#8217;S &#8216;AM I RACIST?&#8217; NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+</a></h3>
There are definitely reasons to think SSRIs could play a role in this kind of violence. For one thing, you can look at the warning label on SSRIs, which states that the drugs can actually increase the risk of suicide and violent behavior in some cases. The drugmakers are telling us outright that these drugs can put violent thoughts into your head. They can make you want to lash out violently against yourself or other people. The pharmaceutical companies are telling us that directly. And yet when that thing happens, they will insist that the drug they said can cause it to happen, must not have caused it to happen.
Or you can look at the studies that show that SSRIs can increase the risk of violence in people who aren&#8217;t depressed at all. A few years ago, for example, researchers in Denmark reviewed experiments going back to the 1960s. And they found that, when healthy volunteers — meaning, people with no mental health issues — were given antidepressants, the drugs doubled their risk of &#8220;suicidality and violence.&#8221;
So why did that happen? Why might SSRIs make healthy people more violent?
The honest answer is that we have no idea. Just a few years ago, we learned that there&#8217;s actually no clear link between low serotonin levels and depression. This was the central claim that supposedly justified the mass-adoption of SSRIs in this country, and it&#8217;s completely false. We have no idea what these drugs are actually doing. So maybe we should pump the brakes a bit. That&#8217;s what RFK tried to say yesterday. Here&#8217;s the response he got:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="004 RFK on SSRIs" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2tg3QA_TZeo?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
Usually, you expect that in a confirmation hearing, the worst thing that can happen is that the nominee says something disqualifying. But in this case, the senator said something disqualifying. Let me be extremely clear about this: If you need psychiatric drugs in order to function, then you are not fit to serve at the highest levels of government. You&#8217;re not qualified to teach elementary school students or operate heavy machinery, for that matter. You simply cannot claim that you&#8217;re competent to govern if you need to regularly take psychoactive substances. Am I saying that every lawmaker on anti-depressants should be removed from office? Yes, I am absolutely saying that. That should be common sense.
More importantly, RFK is obviously right about SSRIs. When the peer-reviewed journal &#8220;Molecular Psychiatry&#8221; — one of the most prominent journals in the field — admits that depression isn&#8217;t actually caused by a serotonin imbalance, which is what happened in 2022, then it&#8217;s obviously worth taking a close look at a class of antidepressants that&#8217;s entitled, &#8220;Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors.&#8221; If a comprehensive review finds that we were wrong about these drugs for decades, then maybe we need some more information and studies before we prescribe them to millions of people — including children.
But of course, this is a pattern in the healthcare industry. Drugs are approved all the time when they don&#8217;t actually work — at least not in any way that we understand. As RFK Jr. said yesterday, it was a similar story for Alzheimer&#8217;s drugs. Some of these drugs received a lot of funding and fast-track approvals, only to turn out to be completely useless. In one case, the data supporting these drugs was actually faked. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="005 Alzheimers Research" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GLftqaQYl5E?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
By this point you can probably tell that this hearing didn&#8217;t go very well for Democrats. Later on, they tried to attack him for pointing out that Lyme Disease has some very conspicuous origins. Apparently we&#8217;re supposed to think — post-COVID — that it&#8217;s an outlandish conspiracy theory to believe that Lyme Disease could possibly have anything to do with government labs injecting ticks with various exotic diseases.
Then there was this moment, where one Democrat tried to make the point that RFK Jr. doesn&#8217;t believe that germs can cause disease. Then he refuted what she was saying, so she just &#8220;read it into the record&#8221; anyway. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="006 Avian" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VnDwo3b7iXk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
These hearings are all like this. They&#8217;re not actually about getting any kind of thoughtful answer from the nominee. It&#8217;s all drive-by soundbites. It doesn&#8217;t even matter what he says.
But even by this low standard, there was one moment in yesterday&#8217;s hearing that managed to stand out. This moment comes to us from Bernie Sanders. Sanders began by asking RFK Jr. whether healthcare is a human right, and he said no, because no one — especially gluttons or habitual smokers — is entitled to anyone else&#8217;s labor. And then Sanders resorted to berating RFK Jr. for his support of anti-vaccine apparel — specifically, anti-vaccine onesies. Behold one of the greatest moments in modern congressional history:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="007 Bernie Onesies" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dAqC7pt9OGA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
This is the level of seriousness that Democrats are applying to these confirmation hearings. They barely even mentioned gender ideology, or how RFK Jr. plans to end the castration of children in this country. They weren&#8217;t remotely interested in his call for more transparent and accurate data in modern medicine. Instead, one by one, Democrats ran interference for Big Pharma. They talked about anti-vax &#8220;onesies&#8221; and demanded that RFK stop bullying Merck.
Democrats like to pretend that they stand against “corporate greed&#8221; and so on. But you simply cannot pretend to be an avenger for the working class standing against corrupt billionaires if you will also defend the pharmaceutical industry to your dying breath. There is no greater example of corporate greed than what we have seen from Big Pharma.
This is an industry that we know for an absolute fact has pushed literal poison on people, by the millions, and done it all for no reason other than pure profit. This is the industry that supplies actual castration drugs to 13-year-olds. An industry that got millions of Americans hooked on anti-depressants on false pretenses, based on a belief in a chemical imbalance that doesn’t exist. There are dozens of other examples just like this. And they are all things that Democrats don&#8217;t want us to talk about — and have in fact attempted to forcibly prevent us from talking about.
So whatever reservations conservatives have about RFK Jr., it&#8217;s very clear that he needs to be confirmed. We have a real opportunity to install someone who is skeptical of the junk science we&#8217;ve been relentlessly fed for decades, on everything from SSRIs to Alzheimer’s to gender ideology. And after yesterday&#8217;s debacle of a confirmation hearing, it&#8217;s clear we need to take this opportunity now, while we still have it.

Senate Finance Committee Holds Confirmation Hearing For Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Democrats Shill For Big Pharma In RFK Jr. Confirmation Hearing

Elizabeth Warren

A <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-releases-second-interim-staff-report-prescription-drug-middlemen" target="_blank" rel="noopener">report</a> published Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revealed that pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) hiked the costs of many important prescription drugs by over 1,000%.
The three largest PBMs — which are owned by CVS Health, Cigna, and UnitedHealth Group — generated over &#8220;$7.3 billion in revenue from dispensing drugs in excess of the drugs’ estimated acquisition costs from 2017-2022,&#8221; according to the FTC. The report found that more than one in five &#8220;specialty drugs&#8221; dispensed by pharmacies affiliated with PBMs were marked up by over 1,000%. Another 41% of drugs were marked up between 100-1,000%. The &#8220;Big 3&#8221; PBMs control between 60-80% of the prescriptions in the U.S.
“The FTC staff’s second interim report finds that the three major pharmacy benefit managers hiked costs for a wide range of lifesaving drugs, including medications to treat heart disease and cancer,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC should keep using its tools to investigate practices that may inflate drug costs, squeeze independent pharmacies, and deprive Americans of affordable, accessible healthcare—and should act swiftly to stop any illegal conduct.”
PBMs act as the middlemen between drug manufacturers, insurance companies, pharmacies, and patients and were originally designed to maintain affordable drug prices for patients while helping drug manufacturers keep their profits. According to the FTC report, however, PBMs have turned into money-making machines while &#8220;squeeze[ing[ independent pharmacies, and depriv[ing] Americans of affordable, accessible healthcare.&#8221;
Austin Ownbey — who represents the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, which in turn represents PBMs — spoke during the open commission meeting Tuesday. Ownbey argued, “PCMA has significant concerns that a second interim report regarding specialty drugs is unlikely to be anything other than a piece of advocacy without substantiating evidence.”
“Specialty drugs offer the most effective and, in some cases, the only treatment for illness and conditions that historically had few treatment options, including multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, cancer and autoimmune disorders,” he added, according to <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5085119-ftc-report-pharmacy-benefit-managers/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Hill</a>.
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Along with hiking prices for vital prescription drugs, the FTC found that the &#8220;Big 3 PBMs also reimbursed their affiliated pharmacies at a higher rate than they paid unaffiliated pharmacies on nearly every specialty generic drug examined.&#8221; As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/a-little-known-health-care-middleman-is-becoming-more-powerful-independent-pharmacies-say-that-spells-disaster-for-patients" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Daily Wire reported</a> last July, independent pharmacies across the country are subject to the dictates of PBMs, which give an unfair advantage to large pharmacy corporations such as CVS, Cigna, and UnitedHealth Group. Independent pharmacists such as Brent Talley, Blake Lamm, and April Lamm Blackford in North Carolina have been sounding the alarm on the rise of PBMs.
“We have lost customers either because the PBM is requiring them to use another store or financially incentivizing them to do so,” Talley told The Daily Wire in July. “But at the same time, the quality of care we’re able to provide has far exceeded Walgreens’ and CVS’.”
Often, local pharmacies will lose money on prescription drugs because the reimbursements they get from a PBM are less than what it costs them to fill a prescription.
“We have to buy bottles to put the medicine in, the caps, the labels, the machines, the printers, all that kind of stuff that are the cost of business, but when I say I’m losing money on prescriptions, I’m losing money on what it cost to get the drug on the shelf,” Blake Lamm said. “That doesn’t even factor in filling the prescription.”
The second interim report was released with bipartisan support in Congress, including from Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), along with Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) and Diana Harshbarger (R-TN).

Prescription drugs

Pharmacy Benefit Managers Marked Up Specialty Drugs By Over 1,000%: FTC Report

Economy

Federal Government

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