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Senators Want to Know Why RFK Jr. Dined With Pharma Execs at Trump's Private Club
"You owe the American public an explanation for why you took part in PhRMA's influence-peddling events with President Trump," wrote Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Bernie Sanders.
Mar 11, 2025
A group of progressive U.S. senators on Monday pushed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, to disclose what he and President Donald Trump discussed with pharmaceutical executives at recent private dinners as the industry pressures the new administration to end Medicare drug price negotiations.
In a letter to Kennedy, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pointed to Wall Street Journal reporting from last month on the millions of dollars that healthcare industry executives spent to dine with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida ahead of his inauguration.
Kennedy, according to the Journal, "attended several of the dinners, but largely stayed quiet as Trump and others talked."
Warren, Wyden, and Sanders wrote to Kennedy that "the dinners may have served as an opportunity for Big Pharma to gain insider access to both you and President Trump" and asked the HHS chief to reveal information about the meetings with industry executives, including how many there have been since the November election and whether Medicare drug price negotiations or other critical matters were discussed.
"Big Pharma stands to profit immensely from a second Trump administration, especially if they can convince you and President Trump to abandon policies like Medicare drug price negotiations and patent reform that would save Americans hundreds of billions of dollars on lifesaving drugs," the senators wrote. "Indeed, the executives that attended these dinners have called on him to 'pause drug negotiations'—negotiations that are expected to save taxpayers $100 billion by 2032."
"You owe the American public an explanation for why you took part in PhRMA's influence-peddling events with President Trump, what happened at these meetings, and whether they will affect your commitment to ensuring that Americans receive the relief they deserve from high drug prices," the senators added.
RFK Jr. said he'd "clean up corruption" as HHS Secretary. So why'd he have dinner with Big Pharma executives at Mar-a-Lago with Trump? The American people deserve to know what kind of deals might have been made at those "million-dollar" dinners.
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— Elizabeth Warren (@warren.senate.gov) March 10, 2025 at 7:29 PM
The Journal reported that the CEO of Pfizer, which pumped $1 million into Trump's inaugural committee, was among the executives who attended the private Mar-a-Lago dinners. Eli Lilly's chief executive also joined at least one of the dinners.
Though Kennedy, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, has vocally criticized Big Pharma and its political influence, the industry did not lobby against his nomination to lead HHS, which oversees the Medicare drug price negotiations that began during the Biden administration.
Last month, the head of the pharmaceutical industry's biggest lobbying group and several pharma CEOs met with Trump as part of a campaign to weaken the price negotiations, which threaten drugmakers' ability to jack up prices at will.
The negotiations have yielded significant results, but Trump's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—an agency within HHS—has signaled it is open to altering the program.
"The Trump administration's statement is far from an embrace of drug price negotiation," Wyden and other senators warned earlier this year, "and appears to be opening the door to changes that could undermine Medicare's ability to get the best price possible on drugs."
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'Stakes Are Huge': Medicare Makes Opening Bids in Price Negotiations With Big Pharma
"For the first time, Medicare isn't just accepting whatever prices the drug corporations set for expensive and widely used drugs," said one campaigner.
Feb 01, 2024
The Biden administration announced Thursday that it made its opening bids as part of Medicare's historic drug price negotiation program, which major pharmaceutical companies are working hard to kill in court.
The initial offers, which were not made public, were sent to the manufacturers of the 10 drugs that the Biden administration selected for the initial round of price negotiations. Additional medicines will be subject to price negotiations in later years.
The companies—including Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Amgen—have 30 days to either accept Medicare's proposed maximum fair price for the selected medicines or put forth a counteroffer. Over the coming spring and summer, Biden administration officials will hold negotiation meetings with drug company representatives to resolve price disputes if the government doesn't accept the drugmakers' counters.
In September, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will publish the negotiated prices, which won't take effect until 2026.
Margarida Jorge, the head of Lower Drug Prices Now, said in a statement Thursday that "for the first time, Medicare isn't just accepting whatever prices the drug corporations set for expensive and widely used drugs in Part D like Xarelto and Eliquis—instead, the agency, newly empowered under the new Medicare negotiations law, will propose lower prices for 10 of the most expensive drugs in Medicare Part D to kick off the negotiations process."
Jorge noted that around 9 million seniors on Medicare "spent an estimated $3.4 billion out-of-pocket on these ten drugs in 2022 to treat blood clots, cancer, diabetes, arthritis and other common conditions."
"Big Pharma made record profits by using their monopoly power to set prices and keep them high, forcing many Medicare patients to forgo other necessities, incur debt, or go without medicine because the prescriptions were not affordable," Jorge added. "Now, despite a barrage of lawsuits, paid ads, and threatening prognostications from the drug corporations, Medicare is on track to implement the new reforms that will lower prices, make costs affordable, and save taxpayers billions over the next decade."
"We are moving ahead to help people in spite of pharma's efforts to block negotiation in the courts."
The list prices of the drugs chosen for the initial round of negotiations range from around $7,000 a year in the case of Johnson & Johnson's Xarelto to over $133,000 annually for AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson's Imbruvica.
Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, said he expects the price negotiations to be "tense and hostile" given that the "stakes are huge for industry and the administration."
"It'll end up at SCOTUS and become a central issue in the 2024 presidential election," Gostin predicted.
A majority of the initial 10 drugs are made by companies that are currently suing the Biden administration in an effort to strike down the price negotiation program, which represents a serious challenge to the industry's ability to drive up prices at will.
According to government data, the selected drugs accounted for roughly 20% of total Medicare Part D spending between June 1, 2022 and May 31 of last year.
An analysis released earlier this month by the Commonwealth Fund found that list prices for the 10 drugs are three times higher on average in the U.S. than in other rich countries.
David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, said Thursday that the Biden administration's opening offers mark a "big step forward to lower drug prices."
"We are moving ahead to help people in spite of pharma's efforts to block negotiation in the courts," Mitchell added. "A good day for America."
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'Appalling': EU Nations Destroy €4 Billion Worth of Covid Vaccines After Hoarding Doses
"Handing exclusive rights to publicly-funded vaccines and medicines to just a few companies simply does not work—for rich countries or poorer ones," said an adviser to the People's Vaccine Alliance.
Dec 18, 2023
Vaccine equity campaigners on Monday condemned European Union nations for hoarding Covid-19 vaccine doses at the expense of low-income countries after a new Politico analysis estimated that the bloc's members have thrown out at least €4 billion—roughly $4.4 billion—worth of the lifesaving shots.
That equates to around 215 million coronavirus vaccine doses—very likely an undercount, given that Politico wasn't able to obtain waste numbers from every E.U. member country.
"Calculations based on available data show that E.U. countries have discarded an average of 0.7 jabs for every member of their population," the outlet reported. "Top of the scale is Estonia, which binned more than one dose per inhabitant, followed closely by Germany, which also threw away the largest raw volume of jabs."
Piotr Kolczyński, E.U. health policy adviser at the People's Vaccine Alliance and Oxfam International, said in a statement that the new analysis is "further proof that the E.U. wasted millions of its Covid-19 vaccines, hoarded early in the pandemic, as it locked poorer countries out of access."
"The appalling waste in the world's pandemic response was disastrous," said Kolczyński. "Handing exclusive rights to publicly-funded vaccines and medicines to just a few companies simply does not work—for rich countries or poorer ones."
Politico attributed much of the waste to the E.U.'s massive 2021 deal with Pfizer and BioNTech, which agreed to sell 1.1 billion doses of their mRNA jab to members of the bloc as low-income countries struggled to obtain shots for their populations.
"Despite considering a significant reform to reign in pharmaceutical waste and profiteering within its borders, the EU fails to support similar efforts on the global stage."
E.U. members—Germany in particular—pushed back aggressively against the India and South Africa-led call for a Covid-19 vaccine patent waiver, which proponents said would have lifted key barriers to expanding vaccine manufacturing and access. Germany alone has wasted 83 million vaccine doses, according to Politico.
The pharmaceutical industry, for its part, lobbied aggressively to preserve its monopoly control over vaccine recipes and production, focusing significant attention on the European Commission.
With the global health emergency formally over, countries are currently negotiating the terms of a pandemic agreement that would govern how the international community responds to the next global crisis.
Reuters reported in September that "governments remain divided, failing to agree on some of the basics needed to strengthen health systems worldwide."
"Those basics, all issues that hindered a coordinated global response to the Covid-19 outbreak, include the sharing of information, costs, and vaccines," Reuters added. "The divisions arose anew in June, when the European Union negotiated new agreements with pharmaceutical companies to reserve vaccines for future pandemics. The agreements led critics to accuse the bloc of 'vaccine apartheid.'"
Last month, 18 members of the European Parliament wrote to the Council of the European Union and the European Commission expressing "concerns about the E.U.'s negotiating position."
"It proposes to continue relying solely on voluntary measures in the deployment of key public health interventions, such as the transfer of technology, know-how and 'trade secrets,' or the removal of intellectual property barriers," the lawmakers wrote. "In the meantime, the E.U. avoids specific commitments for equitable access to pandemic products."
As the People's Vaccine Alliance noted Monday, the E.U.'s latest proposed text "suggests removing transparency and equity measures."
"Despite considering a significant reform to reign in pharmaceutical waste and profiteering within its borders, the E.U. fails to support similar efforts on the global stage," said Kolczyński. "It is one rule for the E.U. and another for everyone else."
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