(The Epoch Times)—President Donald Trump announced agreements with nine of the largest pharmaceutical companies to offer drugs to Americans at lower prices during a Roosevelt Room ceremony on Dec. 19.
“This represents the greatest victory for patient affordability in the history of American health care, by far, and every single American will benefit,” Trump said while flanked by executives representing the manufacturing giants.
“So, this is the biggest thing ever to happen on drug pricing and on health care. This will have a tremendous impact on health care itself.”
The deals with Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb, Genentech, Merck, and five others will reduce costs for treatments related to autoimmune diseases, cancer, diabetes, and other disorders.
Trump’s drive to obtain most-favored-nation pricing has now brought 14 of the 17 biggest drug manufacturers into the initiative after AstraZeneca, EMD Serono, Novo Nordisk, Lilly, and Pfizer signed deals earlier this year.
“What was once considered impossible is now a reality,” a senior administration official told reporters during a briefing on Friday. “This is what bold leadership delivers.”
Support for the president’s pricing plan is gaining momentum among pharmaceutical company executives.
“What we’ve observed is initial industry hesitance collapsing into cooperation,” the official said. “It’s gone from a bold policy to an industry standard, and it’s happened in record time.”
“Most-favored-nation” pricing, directed by the president with an executive order in May, will ensure that Americans pay the same price or lower than in other developed countries.
“The days of American families subsidizing cut-rate drugs for the rest of the world are ending,” the official said.
Trump noted that 4 percent of the world’s population resides in the United States, yet 75 percent of pharmaceutical company profits come from the region.
“That’s why I signed an executive order instructing my administration to do everything in its power to slash prescription drug prices for Americans while getting other countries to pay more,” he said, adding at the end of the meeting that he will convene insurance companies soon to discuss further cost-savings efforts.
One unnamed drug manufactured in New Jersey and sold in the United States for $1,300 was available for $88 in London, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“We were paying for all the innovation in this country, and yet the rest of the world was free riding on it,” Kennedy said.
He said the new agreements will help millions of people across the nation.
“Nobody has done anything for affordability greater than this,” Kennedy said.
The president said his trade policies and threats of tariffs created the leverage necessary to complete the negotiations.
“If we didn’t have the use of tariffs, we would never be able to do this,” Trump said.
Prices of drugs for Medicaid patients will match most-favored-nation levels “nearly immediately, protecting our most vulnerable citizens,” according to the official.
Alleviating financial burdens that cause some seniors and others to skip medications, postpone treatments, or acquire medical debt is a priority for the administration.
A new federal government website, Trumprx.gov, is set to launch in January 2006, offering reduced prices on many prescription drugs.
Blood thinner medications will decrease from $750 to $16, while hepatitis B and C medicines will fall from $1,400 and $25,000 to $413 and $2,500, respectively.
Drugs now in development will all be sold at most-favored-nation prices.
Additionally, companies are donating medicines, including 2.5 tons of antibacterial medications from Merck, 200 pounds of inhaler ingredients from GSX, and more than 6.5 tons of blood thinners from Bristol Myers Squibb—a U.S.-based firm that committed to investing $40 billion in domestic operations.
“These investments reflect our enduring commitment to work with the administration to improve patient lives,” Cari Gallman, executive vice president of Bristol Myers Squibb said during the event.
The new deals also include more than $150 billion in investments across the companies as they expand research, development, and manufacturing operations in the United States.
“This is about rebuilding American might,” the official said, noting an expected boost in job opportunities and economic development.
“It means more national security and more American independence.”
The president said economic disadvantages, which existed for decades in prescription drug prices, for American consumers are detrimental to the nation.
“You can’t continue to pay 13, 14 times more than other countries and think you’re going to have security,” Trump said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.