President Donald Trump at a meeting of the cabinet at the White House in Washington, DC, United States, Tuesday, July 8, 2025.
Aaron Schwartz | Bloomberg | Getty images
President Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday to impose up to 200% of prices on pharmaceutical products imported into the United States “very soon”.
“These will be prices at a very high rate, like 200%,” said Trump at a meeting of the firm.
But he suggested that these samples would not immediately enter, saying that he “will give people about a year, a year and a half”.
“We will give them a certain period of time to bring together their act,” said Trump, seemingly referring to drug manufacturers bringing manufacturing to the United States
Details on pharmaceutical rates “will come at the end of the month,” said trade secretary Howard Lutnick in CNBC after the firm’s meeting.
“With pharmaceutical products and semiconductors, these studies are completed at the end of the month, and therefore the president will then define his policies then, and I will let him wait to decide how he will do it,” said Libnick.
The president has threatened several times, then changed the course on pricing proposals, there is therefore no guarantee that he will set pharmaceutical rates at the rate of 200%. Pharmaceutical stocks were largely unchanged following Trump’s comments.
In a note from Tuesday, Leerink Partners’ analyst David Risinger said he thought that the announcement was positive for industry “because the prices will not be implemented immediately … and it is not clear if the administration will continue in the future”.
This is Trump’s most significant commentary on the prices specific to pharmaceutics since April, when his administration launched a so-called survey of article 232 on these products. This legal authority allows the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the impact of imports on national security.
These planned prices would take a hard blow for pharmaceutical companies, many of which have pushed back and warned that samples could increase costs, dissuade investments in the United States and disrupt the drug supply chain, which endangered patients. The industry is already browsing the benefits of Trump’s drug pricing policies, which drug manufacturers claim threatening both their net profit and their ability to invest in research and development.
Trump said prices will encourage pharmaceutical companies to move manufacturing operations in the United States Eli Lilly,, Johnson & Johnson,, Abbvie And others are already putting more money in the United States after the manufacture of domestic drugs has reduced considerably in recent decades.
Phrma, the largest lobbying group in industry in the United States, has reiterated a previous statement that repels pharmaceutical prices.
“Each dollar spent in prices is a dollar that cannot be invested in American manufacturing or the development of treatments and future remedies for patients,” said Alex Schriver, vice-president of public affairs of Phrma, in the press release.
“The industry shares President Trump’s objective to revitalize American manufacturing and recently announced hundreds of billions of dollars in American investment, but the tariff on drugs would be counterproductive to these efforts,” he continued. “Medicines have always been exempt from prices because they can increase costs and cause shortages.”