President-elect Donald Trump, whose victory last month was greeted with a surge in pharmaceutical stocks, declared himself an opponent of high drug prices in an interview with Time magazine.
“I’m going to bring down drug prices. I don’t like what’s happened with drug prices,” Trump said, according to a transcript of the interview posted on Time’s website.
Over the past 18 months, companies including Mylan NV, maker of allergy shot EpiPen, and Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc., have borne the brunt of public outrage over drug costs.
Last week, the chief executives of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Pfizer Inc. sparred over the reasons their industry’s reputation has suffered, including the role that prices have played.
The SPDR S&P Biotech ETF fell 2.5 percent at 9:02 a.m. before U.S. markets opened.
Trump has been cited as a boon to free-market health care, but drug company executives and industry observers have already said that he may scrutinize their prices as a populist issue.
Allergan Plc Chief Executive Officer Brent Saunders said at a conference last week that Trump could be more “vicious” on pricing than defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and that he worried his industry has a “false sense of relief” after Trump’s victory.
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