Wary drugmakers move to fend off further attacks under Trump

If the nation’s pharmaceutical executives thought Donald J Trump would grant them a reprieve from scrutiny over high drug prices, he made them reconsider that idea in the last few days.

“I’m going to bring down drug prices,” he told Time magazine in an interview published on Wednesday. “I don’t like what’s happened with drug prices.”

The comments remained a warning blow for an industry that had rallied in the weeks after the election, on the assumption that Trump and a Republican Congress would be friendly to the nation’s drugmakers. Suddenly, it looked as if pharmaceutical companies might join Carrier, Ford and Boeing as targets of Trump’s ire.

But unlike those other companies, many drug makers have already been taking steps in recent weeks to insulate themselves from future attacks. Some have pledged to limit price increases. Others offered plainspoken critiques of drug pricing. And the industry’s two main lobbying groups have pushed ahead with major campaigns intended to win back the narrative.

“It’s very easy to villainise pharma, and Trump loves pointing out the bad guys,” said Alana Dovner, a research analyst at Beacon Policy Advisors. “And pharma knows that.”

On Monday, Novo Nordisk, the Danish manufacturer of diabetes treatments like insulin, whose prices have risen sharply in recent years, announced that it would limit price increases in the American market to less than 10 per cent in a year. It raised list prices two times in 2015 — once by 5.9 per cent and another time by 9.9 per cent — on a vial of Novolog, one of its insulin products.

Novo Nordisk was the second large drugmaker in recent months to make such a pledge: Allergan’s chief executive, Brent Saunders, did so in September.

Saunders also warned colleagues at a health care meeting in New York this month that Trump might be “a more vicious tweeter” toward the industry than Hillary Clinton. On Wednesday, Saunders called on the industry to take control of the story.

“If our industry can self-regulate on pricing, we can all focus on investing in innovative medicines and cures and move the pricing discussion to the back burner,” he said in a statement. “I think everyone, especially the patient, is better off if that happens.”

Some drugmakers have pledged to limit price increases. Others offered plainspoken critiques of drug pricing