Denmark says Trump’s drug pricing order is a step in the wrong direction

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COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark’s business minister said on Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order which directs drugmakers to lower drug prices would create uncertainty and challenges for Danish pharmaceutical companies.

The wide-reaching order gives drugmakers price targets in the next 30 days. The U.S. administration has said it will take further action to lower prices if companies do not make “significant progress” toward the goals.

“What Donald Trump has said about pharmaceuticals is just another step in the wrong direction,” Morten Bodskov told reporters on Friday following a meeting with representatives from the Danish life science and pharmaceutical industry.

“It creates more uncertainty, it creates new barriers to our trade and it is in every way the wrong way to go,” he added.

“We’re talking about large globally dominant companies that are of course challenged by what we hear from the U.S. administration.”

Bodskov said Trump’s order had an impact on billion-dollar investments made by the life science industry.

“Uncertainty is not good for those investments,” he said.

Trump said on Monday that the U.S. government would impose tariffs if the prices in the U.S. did not match those in other countries and said he was seeking cuts of between 59% and 90%.

A business ministry spokesperson said representatives for Bavarian Nordic, Zealand Pharma, Lundbeck and Leo Pharma had participated in the meeting.

Representatives from industry associations Danish Biotech and Medicoindustrien as well as the Danish Chamber of Commerce, the Danish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry and the Confederation of Danish Industry had also joined, he said.

(Reporting by Isabelle Yr Carlsson and Louise Breusch Rasmussen, editing by Anna Ringstrom and Jane Merriman)