Public Citizen Demands Pfizer Retract Threats To Withhold Medicines From Europe
Albert Bourla
Pfizer Inc.
66 Hudson Boulevard East
New York, NY
10001-2192
March 9, 2026
Mr. Bourla,
Earlier this year, you told reporters that European nations like France must pay even more for medicines. If not, Pfizer will “stop supplying France,” you said.
That is an outrageous statement that blithely disregards Pfizer’s duty to patients. The millions of people who ration medicine in the United States and worldwide due to high prices cannot afford to let it happen. Cancer patients already are losing access to medicines in Switzerland and experts predict that a United Kingdom deal with the U.S. to raise its drug prices could lead to nearly 16,000 additional deaths a year.
Yes, Americans pay far too much for drugs. But that is not France’s fault, or responsibility. It is yours. The drug industry can afford to sell its medicines to Americans for less, without harming people in other countries and without harming innovation.
You should retract your threat and pledge not to withdraw drugs from other countries or delay launches in these countries, in response to the United States’s focus on “most-favored-nation” or international reference pricing. Stop using much-needed and relatively limited U.S. price concessions as an excuse to bilk European countries for more profits.
The drug industry has long pushed the myth that the lifesaving medicines available today and the promise of new pharmaceutical advancements in the future are only possible because of the premium prices Americans pay for those treatments. But drug prices are not linked to the costs of research and development. Moreover, the vast majority of pharma corporation revenue is not spent on R&D.
Drugmakers could charge much lower prices in the U.S. and still easily cover their global R&D budgets, with healthy profits. Pfizer has generated more than double global R&D budget with its U.S. premium pricing alone, research has shown, while some drug corporations make enough from the premium pricing of just one of their drugs to cover their entire global R&D budgets.
Meanwhile in Europe, Pfizer and its big pharma peers are more than recovering their R&D costs and maintaining high profits. One recent study looked at six cancer treatments sold by drugmakers in Switzerland and found the companies made profit margins of 40 to 90 percent in that country after accounting for Switzerland’s proportion of R&D costs. And, contrary to your myth, companies are committing a similar percentage of sales to R&D in Europe as they do in the United States.
The European pharma industry’s own data indicates its members spent €55 billion on R&D in 2024 and took in €185 in payment from state health insurance systems for ambulatory care, which is an underestimate of total drug payments received in these countries. And between 2020 and 2024 pharmaceutical R&D expenditures grew faster in Europe than in the U.S. (8.3% versus 3.0% annual growth rate).
The drug industry’s threats to Europe come as it notes that most-favored-nation policies won’t lower costs for Americans. Drug companies’ financial disclosures suggest that the industry isn’t expecting much financial impact from the current U.S. policy changes. These admissions make your threats to global access even crueler.
Americans aren’t going bankrupt from their cancer treatment because Europeans are getting the same treatment for less. They are going broke so you can receive your $24.6 million pay package, and they are going broke so you can enrich shareholders with billions in dividends and stock buybacks.
Perhaps most concerning, the drug industry has spent significant time and energy fueling these false ideas around American innovation, while largely remaining silent on true threats to U.S. medical progress. The Trump administration is intent on gutting the National Institutes of Health, American research universities and the Food and Drug Administration, all of which play key roles in the pharmaceutical innovation that Pfizer would like Americans to believe comes only from industry. The Trump team also is busy advancing policies that will endanger public health by making it harder for Americans to access health insurance or life-saving innovations like vaccines. Some corporations even have announced plans to cut research investments because of this environment.
Pfizer appears to have hedged its bet, that the benefits of a Trump administration that will help keep drug prices and profits high is worth the long-term harms to scientific and medical advancement and to health. When asked if you stood by your prediction that Trump would be a net positive for the drug industry, you answered yes. But a net positive for drug industry profits is not the same as a net positive for American patients or patients across the globe.
It is unconscionable for you to threaten to hold people’s medicine for ransom. Fortunately, every country has the option to overcome your patent monopoly and authorize generic alternatives to any product you delay or fail to launch, through compulsory licensing. We will encourage countries to act.
Pfizer must commit to making its medicines reliably accessible everywhere.
We await your reply to this letter.
Sincerely,
Peter Maybarduk
Access to Medicines Director, Public Citizen