“Most powerful executive order on pharmacy pricing and health care ever in the history of our nation.”
President Donald Trump hosted a press conference with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and other health administration officials Monday morning formally announcing an executive order aiming to drastically reduce what Americans pay for their prescription drugs up to 90%, according to Trump.
The order seeks to reform how much the U.S. pays for pharmaceutical drugs compared to other countries. On average, Americans pay nearly four times more than other countries for their prescription drugs, effectively subsidizing pharmaceutical companies’ research and development costs for others around the world, according to the administration.
The order was immediately met with skepticism by some critics.
“If Trump is serious about making real change rather than just issuing a press release, he will support legislation I will introduce to ensure we pay no more for prescription drugs than people in other major countries,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., posted on X after the press conference, touting his own legislation and saying Trump’s order will be “thrown out by the courts.”
“If we come together, we can get it passed in a few weeks,” Sanders said.
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner and Johns Hopkins surgical oncologist Marty Makary was one of the officials who spoke at the press conference Monday morning.
“We didn’t take an oath to heal patients and then watch their life get ruined financially with their home, mortgage, retirement going down the drain with Go Fund Me campaigns, raising money from church communities and synagogues and friends they haven’t seen in 20 years to try to raise money – for what?” said Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary.
“For a system where Americans have been getting ripped off by 10, 12, 15 times higher prices than we see in other countries?”
Makary and others said the “fundamental problem” with American prescription drug costs is a lack of competition in the global marketplace, with Americans comprising only about 4% of the global population but supplying at least two-thirds of drug companies’ revenue globally.
“The fundamental problem in health care is that we’ve had non-competitive markets,” Makary continued. “We can do little things around the edges, or we can transform those markets into competitive markets, and that’s what this executive order does.”
The order intends to secure the “most-favored-nation” price for pharmaceutical drugs for the U.S., or the lowest price among its economic peer countries, through a series of actions. It instructs the U.S. secretary of commerce and the U.S. trade representative to “ensure” that other countries aren’t engaging in practices that “[force] American patients to pay for a disproportionate amount of global pharmaceutical research and development.” Kennedy is to work in coordination with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz and others to develop most-favored-nation target pricing for pharmaceutical companies. It also directs Kennedy to devise direct-to-consumer purchasing programs for drug companies that abide by the president’s most-favored-nation pricing mandate for the U.S.
Oz called the order the “most powerful executive order on pharmacy pricing and health care ever in the history of our nation.”
If drug companies don’t comply, then the order directs Kennedy to create a rulemaking plan to impose the targeted pricing, or certify to Congress that the U.S. can import the drugs that remain too expensive under certain importation waivers. Certain drugs may even have their FDA approvals revoked by Makary.
Kennedy said some politicians, including Sanders, have been promising to “equalize” what the U.S. and Europe pay for pharmaceutical drugs for years, while knowing they can’t deliver on the promise because of the deep entanglement between the pharmaceutical industry and Congress. And even though he too has been promising to do something about the issue for years, he didn’t think he would see a solution emerge in his lifetime.
“I’m just so grateful to be here today. I never thought this would happen in my lifetime,” Kennedy said. “I have a couple of kids who are Democrats, who are big Bernie Sanders fans. When I told them what was going to happen, they had tears in their eyes, because they thought this was never going to happen in our lifetime.”
Kennedy and the other health administration officials who spoke praised the president for being willing to stand up to the industry and its powerful lobby, which has one to three times as many lobbyists in Washington as there are members of Congress and the Supreme Court, according to Kennedy.
“We finally have a president who’s willing to stand up for the American people,” Kennedy said.
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Modernization, as used today by industry lobbyists and public health officials, often amounts to a euphemism for deregulation: fewer checks, less transparency, and faster product pipelines with fewer questions asked. In contrast, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s approach to public health modernization is actual modernization—where rigorous science, true accountability, and unwavering public safety form the non-negotiable baseline.
The Kennedy Regulatory Bar isn’t a buzzword, and it’s certainly not a rhetorical device. It’s an operating philosophy grounded in scientific integrity and public duty. For those who understand regulatory policy only as an obstacle to commercial throughput, the Kennedy Bar feels like a threat. But to those who understand what science is—a falsifiable, ethical, and reproducible method of discovering truth—it represents nothing less than the restoration of sanity.
Defining the Kennedy Regulatory Bar
Secretary Kennedy has made his expectations perfectly clear. In his own words:
“Journalists like yourself assume that vaccines are encountering the same kind of rigorous safety testing as other drugs, including multiyear double-blind placebo testing. But the fact is that vaccines don’t.”
— Interview, STAT News, Aug. 21, 2017
“By freeing [vaccine makers] from liability for negligence, the 1986 statute removed any incentive for these companies to make safe products. If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield.”
— Press Statement in Support of HR 5816, Sept. 26, 2024
“Mr. Kennedy believes vaccination should be voluntary and based on informed consent. For consent to be truly informed, the underlying science must be unbiased and free from corporate influence.”
— Campaign FAQ – Vaccines, Kennedy24.com, Aug. 15, 2023
“My mission over the next 18 months… will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.”
— Campaign Announcement Speech, Boston, Apr. 19, 2023
These principles, articulated repeatedly by Sec. Kennedy across media interviews, press events, and official communications, form the foundation of what we now call the Kennedy Bar.
The Kennedy Regulatory Bar: Five Core Standards
Rigorous Science: Long-term, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials are the gold standard and must not be circumvented. This is but one example. All of biomedical science should be upgraded to highest standards.
Restored Liability: No blanket immunity for manufacturers; liability is essential to safety. This flies in the face of concerted efforts by Pharma to expand liability exemptions (e.g., PREP Act).
Transparency: All trial data must be made publicly available in machine-readable form—no redactions, no gatekeeping. Collins failed to enforce this, and the failure was noted.
Independent Oversight: Regulatory decisions must be made by individuals and boards free of industry conflicts of interest. This includes, but is not limited to, vaccines, drugs, devices, and procedures.
Informed Consent: Patients must receive full, truthful information about benefits and risks—without coercion or censorship, and their rights to free, prior, informed consent are absolute.
These are not radical ideas. They are what science used to be before it was rebranded as a partner to commerce.
Why “Banning the mRNA Vaccines” Isn’t Necessary—If the Regulatory State Is Fixed
Some critics ask: Why not just ban mRNA vaccines outright?
The question misunderstands both the Kennedy Bar and Secretary Kennedy’s governing philosophy. Banning an entire class of biomedical products by executive fiat would mirror the very authoritarianism that corrupted the regulatory state in the first place. The goal is not to replace one top-down mandate with another—it is to restore bottom-up scientific validity, where products succeed or fail based on their actual merit, risk profile, and necessity.
Under the Kennedy Bar, no product—mRNA or otherwise—can bypass the full burden of proof:
Did it go through long-term, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials?
Were all adverse events transparently reported and analyzed?
Was there independent oversight?
Can the public access the raw data?
Was informed consent meaningfully obtained?
If the answer is no—as it has been for many mRNA formulations—then the product simply fails to meet the regulatory standard. No ban is needed. Reality disqualifies it.
The Kennedy strategy is structural, not performative. It focuses on building a regulatory ecosystem that is incapable of licensing unsafe or ineffective products. This is a stronger safeguard than any prohibition. Rather than banning, Kennedy’s approach makes bad science impossible to pass off as medicine.
Once transparency is non-negotiable…
Once liability is restored…
Once regulatory capture is dismantled…
Then any product built on hype, shortcuts, or undisclosed risks—whether mRNA or otherwise—will collapse under the weight of real scrutiny.
That is not censorship. That is civilization defending itself by enforcing its own standards.
Integration Over Isolation
What sets Kennedy’s approach apart is not only the bar he sets for scientific integrity, but it is obvious this is how he is implementing it across government. As Secretary of Health and Human Services, he is already working to integrate the work of all HHS agencies—CDC, NIH, FDA, CMS, HRSA, and others—into a coherent, collaborative ecosystem. No longer will one hand of government ignore the consequences of the other.
Where prior administrations tolerated bureaucratic silos and jurisdictional loopholes, Kennedy insists that scientific rigor be institutionalized—not merely idealized. Under his leadership, agencies are being asked to communicate better, share safety signals earlier, co-design surveillance systems, and synchronize risk communication strategies.
This is not just about stopping regulatory failure. It’s about building functional synergy between the very institutions tasked with protecting public health.
The Academy’s Crisis of Conscience
Many universities have not yet recognized that the Kennedy Bar creates a mirror they cannot easily turn away from. For decades, medical schools and public health departments have received lavish funding from pharmaceutical companies and government agencies with revolving doors. This arrangement has subtly—sometimes overtly—coerced researchers to conform to sponsor expectations, burying negative results and rewarding compliance with publication and promotion.
Secretary Kennedy has quietly changed the rules of engagement. Prestige will no longer in the place of principles. A new standard is emerging, and it doesn’t care what editorial board endorsed your work—it asks what you measured, how long you observed it, and who paid you to interpret it.
I recently gave a speech “How to Speak MAHA” to a collection of research administrators at midwestern state Universities. They did not grasp the reality that those Universities who are cheerleading their researchers to submit more, not fewer, grant proposals in response to calls for proposals to transform medicine will be scheduled for prestige and more funding. Good actors will be rewarded. Those obsessed with their bottom lines will have to find funding elsewhere. Those publishing in sketchy journals against the recommendations of HHS might suffer a ding in their grant scores.
The message from this administration is simple, and our universities now face a choice: modernize into true scientific integrity, or double down on performative consensus. The Kennedy Bar forces the question: Is your institution educating scientists—or training enablers? No grant is worth the erosion of public trust. No journal impact factor outweighs the duty to truth. The age of science as branding is over. The age of science as science—open, accountable, and rigorous—has returned.
The Industry’s Real Dilemma
Pharma does not fear Kennedy because he’s against innovation. They fear him because he demands real innovation—scientific advancements that can survive public scrutiny, not just regulatory maneuvering.
For decades, the vaccine industry has relied on two tricks: (1) measuring success through surrogate endpoints like antibody titers rather than clinical outcomes, and (2) conducting studies in silos—never long enough, never with full data access, and almost never with independent safety boards. This system has produced a torrent of marginally tested products with maximum immunity from liability and minimal transparency.
Under the Kennedy Bar, the era of “emergency forever” is over. The industry must either meet real scientific thresholds or lose the public’s trust—entirely. This is not punishment. It’s evolution. It’s the grown-up phase of medicine. A moment of maturation for a sector that has long preferred speed over scrutiny, revenue over rigor.
And it comes with a choice: evolve or… be revealed.
Outflanking the “Modernization” Rhetoric
The PR pivot has already begun. Corporate spokespeople and foundation-backed academics are working overtime to redefine “modernization” as “streamlining,” “accelerating,” or “expanding access.” But these are euphemisms for lowering standards, usually without public debate.
Kennedy’s modernization is not deregulation. It is re-regulation—the restoration of the scientific method, the demand for data, and the end of special pleading. His is not a revolution in tone, but in epistemology. He is not rebranding trust—he is rebuilding it.
Science Must Outlive the PR Cycle
Regulatory systems that abandon the scientific method for public relations will inevitably collapse. The people know. They have lived the adverse events. They have watched silence fall where transparency was promised. They’ve seen academic journals censor, media outlets spin, and regulators hedge their language to protect careers rather than lives.
The Kennedy Bar is not a barricade—it is a foundation stone. It does not prevent innovation. It ensures that innovation is real.
So to the regulators: Your authority does not come from secrecy—it comes from public trust.
To the industry: Your survival depends on the integrity of your products, not the slickness of your press kits and forward-looking statements.
And to the universities: Your legacy will not be measured in grants received, but in truths defended.
Those who come up to the bar will see not only translational success, but will also transformational success.
The Trump administration is reportedly weighing new restrictions on pharmaceutical ads—an effort long backed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Proposals include stricter disclosure rules and ending tax breaks.
Key Details:
Two key proposals under review: requiring longer side-effect disclosures in TV ads and removing pharma’s tax deduction for ad spending.
In 2024, drug companies spent $10.8 billion on direct-to-consumer ads, with AbbVie and Pfizer among the top spenders.
RFK Jr. and HHS officials say the goal is to restore “rigorous oversight” over drug promotions, though no final decision has been made.
Diving Deeper:
According to a Bloomberg report, the Trump administration is advancing plans to rein in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising—a practice legal only in the U.S. and New Zealand. Rather than banning the ads outright, which could lead to lawsuits, officials are eyeing legal and financial hurdles to limit their spread. These include mandating extended disclosures of side effects and ending tax deductions for ad spending—two measures that could severely limit ad volume, especially on TV.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long called for tougher restrictions on drug marketing, is closely aligned with the effort. “We are exploring ways to restore more rigorous oversight and improve the quality of information presented to American consumers,” said HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon in a written statement. Kennedy himself told Sen. Josh Hawley in May that an announcement on tax policy changes could come “within the next few weeks.”
The ad market at stake is enormous. Drugmakers spent $10.8 billion last year promoting treatments directly to consumers, per data from MediaRadar. AbbVie led the pack, shelling out $2 billion—largely to market its anti-inflammatory drugs Skyrizi and Rinvoq, which alone earned the company over $5 billion in Q1 of 2025.
AbbVie’s chief commercial officer Jeff Stewart admitted during a May conference that new restrictions could force the company to “pivot,” possibly by shifting marketing toward disease awareness campaigns or digital platforms.
Pharma’s deep roots in broadcast advertising—making up 59% of its ad spend in 2024—suggest the impact could be dramatic. That shift would mark a reversal of policy changes made in 1997, when the FDA relaxed requirements for side-effect disclosures, opening the floodgates for modern TV drug commercials.
Supporters of stricter oversight argue that U.S. drug consumption is inflated because of these ads, while critics warn of economic consequences. Jim Potter of the Coalition for Healthcare Communication noted that reinstating tougher ad rules could make broadcast placements “impractical.” Harvard professor Meredith Rosenthal agreed, adding that while ads sometimes encourage patients to seek care, they can also push costly brand-name drugs over generics.
Beyond disclosure rules, the administration is considering changes to the tax code—specifically eliminating the industry’s ability to write off advertising as a business expense. This idea was floated during talks over Trump’s original tax reform but was ultimately dropped from the final bill.
