\n<\/p>\n
O<\/span>f Arthur Scargill it was said that he began each day with two newspapers. The miners\u2019 leader read the Morning Star of course, but only after consulting the Financial Times. Why did a class warrior from Yorkshire accord such importance to the house journal of pinstriped Londoners? Before imbibing views, he told a journalist, he wanted \u201cto get the facts\u201d.<\/p>\n In that spirit, let us parse a deal just struck by the governments of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer. You may not have heard much about this agreement on medicine, but it is huge in both financial and political significance \u2013 and Downing Street could not be more proud.<\/p>\n A \u201cworld-beating deal,\u201d boasts the science minister, Patrick Vallance. It \u201cpaves the way for the UK to become a global hub for life sciences,\u201d claims the business secretary, Peter Kyle, with the government press release adding: \u201cTens of thousands of NHS patients will benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n Presented with such triumph, His Majesty\u2019s press is up on its hindlegs. \u201cHappy pills\u201d ran a laudatory editorial in the Times, while the Daily Mail sportingly thanked Donald Trump for his \u201cUS lifeline for UK pharma\u201d.<\/p>\n Britain 1, America 0! Except that\u2019s not the view from Washington. \u201cA major win for American workers,\u201d says the trade secretary, Howard Luttnick, which \u201censures that the breakthroughs of tomorrow will be built, tested, and produced on American soil.\u201d The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, acclaims \u201cresults that put Americans first\u201d.<\/p>\n One deal, two diametrically opposed readings: who is right? The answer, I regret to inform you, is the Trumpettes. Take this headline from the liberals at the New York Times: \u201cTo avoid tariffs, UK agrees to Trump\u2019s demand to pay more for drugs\u201d.<\/p>\n Starmer and his team have not only been handed a costly defeat; they are misleading you and me about what it means for our NHS, our future treatment, our lives.<\/p>\n Because modelling suggests this will almost certainly cost British lives. Before any agreement was signed, there was an estimate from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) last month that branded medicines could soon cost the NHS an extra \u00a33bn a year. That \u00a33bn extra does not buy us anything \u2013 it is more money for the same medicines.<\/p>\n The health secretary, Wes Streeting, denies it will cost as much, but when I asked the Department of Health how he made those calculations I got no answer. I have also spoken to independent experts who think this brilliant deal will cost more, not less. For the sake of argument, let\u2019s go with a cost of \u00a33bn a year.<\/p>\n Reading between the lines of Streeting\u2019s statements, this money will have to be found from the NHS\u2019s own budget. That \u00a33bn will be have to be found each year by giving fewer cancer scans, longer waits for ambulances and at A&E, and delays on surgery.<\/p>\n There appears to be no government assessment of what this means \u2013 and again neither Streeting\u2019s ministry nor the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology were able to provide one. So I went to Karl Claxton, a professor at the University of York and an expert on the economics of NHS medicines. His modelling, based on years of evidence on the impacts of cuts to health budgets suggests that this deal, celebrated up and down Whitehall and hailed in the Times and the Daily Mail, will mean 15,971 more dead people every year. (If Streeting\u2019s estimate is right, then the number of extra deaths will fall, although only as far as 6,192 \u2013 a comparative bargain.) They won\u2019t know that they\u2019ve died in the service of a deal that provides extra profits to some of the richest companies in the world but Claxton\u2019s view is that the link is \u201ccausal\u201d. This deal, he says, is \u201ca catastrophe for all NHS patients\u201d.<\/p>\n This is quite possibly the first time you\u2019ve read about this agreement and what it means. Just as with the AI deal stuck by Starmer a few weeks ago, there is no paperwork, no official evidence, no vote attached to this. All you have is a Whitehall press release. While national newspapers have been keen to cover the resident doctors\u2019 pay dispute, with 76 stories over the past month according to the Guardian\u2019s research department, they have devoted only 13 stories to this deal, which in financial terms is far bigger.<\/p>\n It also represents a larger threat to our medical system. Unlike the disaster capitalism that reigns over much of US healthcare, the NHS tightly regulates approved drugs, to ensure they offer value for money and that manufacturers do not rake off too much profit. The result is that pills and injections in the US are on average three times more expensive than in the UK. For an object lesson in how to use the power of the public sector to reduce the cost of essentials and attack profiteering, look no further than the NHS\u2019s drug regime. No wonder the pharmaceutical industry hates it.<\/p>\n Its best chance of undermining it has come with Trump\u2019s return to the Oval Office. After promising voters he would lower the cost of living and create more jobs, he demanded pharmaceutical companies invest more in the US and charge Americans less for their medicine. He has also slapped tariffs on the goods the rest of the world sells to the US, which includes a few billion-pounds-worth of British-made serums and tablets. And so Downing Street was set on a collision course with AstraZeneca, Merck and other billion-pound businesses.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/span><\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Things came to a head in the middle of September, with an extraordinary sequence of events. First, Merck scrapped plans for a research centre in King\u2019s Cross, north London, even though it was already under construction. On the same day, the industry\u2019s main lobby group warned about the relatively low prices paid by the NHS for medicines, saying that \u201cin many global boardrooms, the UK is now viewed as a contagion risk with practices that, if adopted by other markets, would threaten the sector\u2019s ability to invest and innovate globally\u201d. Within 24 hours, Eli Lilly, maker of Prozac and Mounjaro, appeared in a trade journal pulling plans for a lab already agreed with the government. Its boss later slammed the UK as \u201cprobably the worst country in Europe\u201d for drug prices. The next day, AstraZeneca paused a project in Cambridge that was supposed to create 1,000 jobs.<\/p>\n These announcements \u201clook very coordinated from the outside\u201d, one senior government official confided to journalists. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like this before, it\u2019s actually pretty sinister.\u201d The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry denies any claims of collusion.<\/p>\n And so we end up with a deal that has barely been explained to the people whom it will most directly hurt. Meanwhile, we have a government hailing as a victory what is actually a singular and costly capitulation, and holding on to lame promises that these drugmakers will invest in the UK. As Sally Gainsbury of the health thinktank the Nuffield Trust says, it is now \u201cpart of a Ponzi scheme, buying treatments that aren\u2019t the best use of money\u201d.<\/p>\n An organisation devoted to saving lives is now being used as part of trade deals, its precious resources and structural integrity haggled away to multinational companies and foreign bullies. Labour never ceases to remind voters that it gave them the NHS, yet in chasing the unicorn of fabulous economic growth its leaders are now changing the very purpose of its proudest creation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Of Arthur Scargill it was said that he began each day with two newspapers. The miners\u2019 leader read the Morning Star of course, but only after consulting the Financial Times. Why did a class warrior from Yorkshire accord such importance to the house journal of pinstriped Londoners? Before imbibing views, he told a journalist, he<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36847,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[14417,336,14418,342,696,964,1346,3948,6678,2362,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-36846","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-aditya","9":"tag-british","10":"tag-chakrabortty","11":"tag-cost","12":"tag-deal","13":"tag-donald","14":"tag-keir","15":"tag-lives","16":"tag-medicines","17":"tag-starmers","18":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}