More Than 100 Organizations Urge Countries to Resist Trump’s Trade Attacks, Protect Access to Affordable Medicines
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Public Citizen, Health GAP, and 99 expert organizations from around the world are calling for an approach to global trade policy that preserves access to affordable medicines and rejects deals made under duress.
The U.S.-UK Big Pharma agreement in principle, borne out of an abuse of trade power and weaponized tariffs, must not be replicated. And even so, in the weeks following the UK deal, the U.S. coerced Argentina into an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) that pushes Big Pharma’s monopolistic agenda at the expense of public health.
Experts from the public health, trade, labor, climate, and faith spaces insist in detail that trade approaches must preserve countries’ abilities to:
- Ensure affordable prices for all
- Reject corporate bullying
- Enable plentiful supply of medicines
- Ensure the safety, efficacy, and quality of medicines
- Freely determine which international treaties are beneficial
- Adhere to transparent and accountable trade processes
More details and list of endorsements are available in the full set of Principles for Access to Medicines and Trade (Spanish translation here).
Public Citizen Access to Medicines Director Peter Maybarduk issued the following statement:
“Trump’s tariff threats lead only to worsening medicine scarcity and rationing. His dishonest alliance with Big Pharma to raise medicine prices abroad risks peoples’ lives while distracting from the real change and pharma accountability we need in the United States to make medicine affordable. Instead of raising costs and making threats, governments should be investing to expand medicine production everywhere, and learning from each other’s best practices to lower prices at home.”
Health GAP Senior Policy Advisor Brook Baker issued the following statement:
“The Trump administration has decimated global health programming and service delivery via reductions and restrictions in foreign assistance for health, but he also seeks to enshrine Big Pharma’s monopoly power via hasty, secretly negotiated trade agreements and trade threats. Rather than encouraging adequate supplies, affordable prices, and equitable access of medical technologies, Trump pursues heightened intellectual-property, price-protection, regulatory rules that maximize Pharma profits at the expense of health by bullying countries with tariffs and other measures. The six principles for trade and access to medicines counter Pharma’s hegemony and Trump’s coercive efforts on its behalf.”
Acción Internacional para la Salud Researcher Javier Llamoza issued the following statement:
“Latinoamérica tienen el derecho soberano de regular, producir y adquirir medicamentos seguros y asequibles, priorizando la vida por encima del lucro. Rechazamos acuerdos que refuercen monopolios, encarezcan los tratamientos y debiliten nuestras capacidades locales. La salud no se negocia bajo presión ni amenazas comerciales.”
“Latin America has the sovereign right to regulate, produce, and acquire safe and affordable medicines, prioritizing life over profit. We reject agreements that strengthen monopolies, increase the cost of treatments, and weaken our local capacities. Health is not negotiable under pressure or commercial threats.”
Global Justice Now Policy and Campaigns Manager Tim Bierley issued the following statement:
“For years, the UK has used sensible price controls to limit the impact of pharma companies’ notorious overcharging for medicines. By capitulating in talks with Trump and the pharma industry and agreeing to water these down, our government has committed the UK to more expensive healthcare with nothing tangible in return.
This terrible deal also sets a worrying precedent, incentivising pharma companies to use ransom-seeking tactics to raise medicines prices around the world. Instead of going it alone, countries must work together to fight the monopoly power of pharma corporations who will always put the opportunity for profit over our health.”
Third World Network Legal and Policy Advisory Sangeeta Shashikant issued the following statement:
“Governments have a legal and moral duty to realise the right to health for their people. Trade policy must never be weaponised to undermine that responsibility or to coerce countries into dismantling their public health safeguards. Any trade framework that restricts policy space, weakens local production, or limits access to affordable medicines is fundamentally incompatible with human rights, especially the right to health, and must be rejected.”
Additional resources:
- TACD raises concerns on use of tariff threats to increase medicine prices in Europe (TACD, February 2026)
- Essential Changes Needed to the USMCA to Remove Impediments to Public Health (Public Citizen & Health GAP, July 2026)
- Raising Prescription Drug Prices Abroad Will Not Lower Prices in the U.S. (Public Citizen, June 2025)
- Europe Must Not Bow to Big Pharma (Letter from civil society organizations; People’s Medicine Alliance, May 2025)
- Resolution on delinking the incentives to invest in biomedical R&D from the prices of products and services (TACD, September 2018)
- Resolution on Access to Medicines (TACD, November 2014)
- Resolution on Innovation and Access to Medical Technologies (TACD, June 2011)
- A Letter to the WHO Proposing a Medical R&D Treaty (Letter from civil society organizations, government officials, others; Knowledge Ecology International, February 2005)