After badmouthing Tylenol, Trump makes deal with their rival company Pfizer

President Donald Trump announced a major drug-pricing agreement with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, supposedly out of the blue. While the White House is also unveiling a new direct-to-consumer website called TrumpRx. It’s a huge shift in the drug-pricing wars, especially since this news comes just days after the President went on a tirade against Tylenol, which is made by a rival company to Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson.

It is weird that a president would badmouth a company before making a deal with their rival, but it seems like a way to butter Pfizer up and make J&J look bad, despite a history of pulling products even when they don’t need to for the public good. This is still a massive deal with one of the biggest drug manufacturers in the world to get prices down for Americans, and you can expect some medications to see discounts as high as 85%, per NBC.

This all comes as the deadline for manufacturers to ‘voluntarily’ agree to lower their prices has just passed. The core of this landmark agreement is that Pfizer has voluntarily agreed to sell its medications through Medicaid at lower prices. This is a massive step forward for the White House’s push to secure what it calls “Most Favored Nation” pricing deals with drug manufacturers, so I guess he’s done with accusing them of making up COVID.

Trump threw Johnson & Johnson under the bus in favor of Pfizer

The whole idea behind this initiative is to link U.S. drug prices to the lowest costs paid by other wealthy countries. I’ve visited other countries, and the medical prices are more than three times cheaper in many cases. Trump has been super clear on this for a while now, arguing that the U.S. government has been spending way too much on medications.

He summed up his position in remarks last week, saying, “We pay much higher for drugs than the rest of the world. We subsidize the rest of the world. We’re not doing that anymore and that’s a big thing”. For those who don’t know, since our medical industry is privatized to help stockholders, we can’t have the same benefits as other countries, whose medical industries tend to work for the government to help the citizens.

Things can’t be cheaper when the people making the prices only want more money. However, this should help. The new TrumpRx website is set up to allow Americans to buy their prescription medications straight from the source at a discounted rate. Pfizer is throwing a ton of support behind this, with a statement from the company confirming that they will participate in the platform.

They’ve agreed to offer a large majority of their primary care treatments and even some select specialty brands with savings that will, on average, hit 50%, with some discounts going as high as 85%. That’s the kind of price cut that could make a difference for people struggling to afford their meds.