Trump’s latest cabinet pick threatens one of Britain’s few remaining industrial treasures
The banks have been quietly celebrating. The oil and gas giants are preparing fresh investment plans. The tech giants have breathed a collective sigh of relief. And the cryptocurrency firms have been going even crazier than usual. Their chief executives may not much like the president-elect’s personality, or his rhetorical style, but most of corporate America has welcomed Donald Trump’s election win.
There is just one exception: big pharma. The crackpot views of his health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr are a real threat to the drugs industry – and Britain’s life science giants will be right on the front line.
Even amid some appointments that can kindly be described as “controversial”, the choice of Kennedy as the new head of the US department of Health and Human Services in the Trump cabinet is explosive.
On the campaign trail when he was running for the presidency himself, Kennedy pushed a whole series of views that appeared to come straight from the crankier back corners of the internet.
Thank you @realDonaldTrump for your leadership and courage. I'm committed to advancing your vision to Make America Healthy Again.
We have a generational opportunity to bring together the greatest minds in science, medicine, industry, and government to put an end to the chronic…— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 14, 2024
He has described the Covid-19 jab as “the deadliest vaccine ever made”, and last year argued that the virus itself was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese. (Despite video footage of his remarks, Mr Kennedy has insisted he was merely pointing out that Covid-19 “appears to disproportionately affect certain races”.)
He has criticised the new generation of weight-loss drugs, arguing that they only “fatten the wallets of pharma executives”. He has argued that government spending and research budgets have to be shifted to preventative medicine, and has even floated the idea of removing fluoride from the water system, and taking additives out of food.
The president-elect seems to have bought into Kennedy’s beliefs.
“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception…and disinformation,” Trump said on announcing the appointment. If he lives up to any of that rhetoric, American health policy will change radically – and not for the better.
It was hardly surprising that, while Wall Street was soaring, the pharma companies were down sharply on news of the appointment. Vaccine manufacturers Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech all suffered steep falls, as did European rivals such as GSK and Sanofi.
Those falls seem likely to continue for the next couple of months as Kennedy assembles his team, and prepares to take charge of his department. True, there may be some legitimate questions to be asked about the Covid vaccines, and whether they were rushed through, and indeed about the origins of the virus itself. It is possible that the pharma industry sometimes over-medicalises conditions, ignoring alternative treatments. But one point is surely clear: RFK Jr is a crackpot, peddling wild conspiracy theories.
That is a real challenge for the pharmaceutical industry, and the UK is going to be right on the front line. The drug giants have always had their critics, mostly on the Left, but they have usually focussed on excessive profits, or on safety standards, or access to medicines for poorer countries. RFK Jr is something completely different. He is attacking the entire scientific foundations of the industry.
The UK will, unfortunately, be one of the countries most exposed to his weird view of the world. Some of our biggest companies may well be hit very hard. For AstraZeneca, 44pc of its sales are in the US. For GSK, it is just as important, with American sales more than double its revenues in the UK.
True, Denmark, the base of the Ozempic manufacturer Novo Nordisk, and Switzerland, home to Novartis and Roche, are equally exposed. But for the UK economy, and for the London stock market, the life sciences industry is uniquely important. It is the one genuinely world-class, technology-based industry the UK has. It is now at risk of being hounded out of, or at least significantly damaged in, its largest and most profitable market.
The pharma industry needs to work out how to respond to the threat RFK Jr poses, and the Government needs to be willing to help. The industry needs to go into lobbying overdrive, explaining to officials, and just as importantly the voters, what work it does and why it matters.
RFK Jr himself may not listen. He is clearly not open to rational argument. But the voters will, and they won’t like the idea of restrictions on the medicines they often depend on, nor will they want risks taken with the safety of the water system. If ordinary Americans can be persuaded to support the industry, that will make a big difference.
Next, the UK needs to be willing to do everything it can to help. We don’t have a free trade deal with the US yet, but negotiations may well restart with Trump in the White House. He is far more sympathetic to the UK than President Biden ever was. As those talks get underway, the UK needs to be making sure that an agreement preserves full and open access to the American market for British life sciences companies. Even short of a full-scale trade deal, ministers and diplomats can at least try to persuade the Trump administration to give the industry a fair hearing.
True, RFK Jr may well prove tamer in office than his cranky rhetoric on the campaign trail would suggest. During Trump’s first term many of his crazier ideas never actually happened.
Officials in the Department of Health may well be able to persuade their boss that many medicines are actually quite useful, and save hundreds of thousands of lives, while dramatically reducing the cost of treatment.
That said, RFK Jr has the look of a fanatic. His core support as a candidate was among conspiracy theorists, and he has dedicated much of his career to campaigning against the drugs and food industries. One point is certain. He is a major threat to one of Britain’s largest and most important industries – and the next few years are going to be very rocky.