Lest you forget, PhRMA: Biopharma is multinational

The U.S. drug industry incontrovertibly has a global reach — but its geographical diversity doesn’t make it onto the talking points that PhRMA is distributing to discredit Nancy Pelosi’s drug pricing plan.

“This omission is a telling one,” Dr. Peter Bach, director of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Drug Pricing Lab, writes for STAT.

That’s because PhRMA’s primary argument for preventing drug pricing sanctions is that they might limit innovation — but as Bach points out, many of the biggest biopharmaceutical players aren’t based stateside. Sanofi is in Paris, Glaxo Smith Kline and AstraZeneca are in London, Takeda’s in Osaka, and both Novartis and Roche are in Switzerland.

Yet drug prices are 75% lower in Switzerland — suggesting that PhRMA’s argument that U.S. innovation is fueled by high price points is based on false logic, Bach writes.