Associated Press US NewsExcerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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Nov. 9
The Washington Post says TrumpRx isn't the best way to lower prices
In a landmark deal announced Thursday, President Donald Trump negotiated dramatically lower costs for weight-loss drugs produced by pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, which could benefit Medicare and Medicaid patients, as well as Americans paying out of pocket. But here’s the skinny: What the president negotiated should not be reserved for big companies that play his game.
GLP-1 medications, including Wegovy and Zepbound, currently have a list price of more than $1,000 for a month-long supply. Trump’s deal would bring that down to $350 on average, and as low as $50 for those who have a co-pay. That could benefit millions of Americans: More than 1 in 10 American adults have tried a weight loss drug, and millions more are interested in doing so.
While specific details of Trump’s deals with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have not been made public, the crux is tariff relief in exchange for lower prices. Both companies have said they will be exempt from Trump’s 100 percent tariff on pharmaceutical imports for the next three years. The companies have also received a promise of priority review for their drugs by the Food and Drug Administration.
To anyone who doesn’t like the idea of tariffs jacking up drug prices or bureaucratic hurdles to new pharmaceuticals, these are obviously good ideas. So why not give them to all drug companies to bring down costs across the board?
The reason is because Trump wants these companies to offer their products on TrumpRx, which is his vision for a government-run website that delivers direct-to-consumer drug sales at highly discounted rates. The platform is a backdoor attempt at pegging drug prices in the United States to the lower levels seen in other developed countries — known as “most-favored nation” pricing, something Trump tried and failed to implement in his first term. Participation is voluntary on the part of manufacturers, but Trump believes he can use his tariffs and other incentives to jawbone them into dealing with the government.
Involving the government in the pricing of medicine might seem appealing based on the European experience, where socialized systems such as Britain’s National Health System negotiate reduced rates because they are buying in bulk for the nation. But it also means bureaucrats get a much bigger say in who can access those drugs, often resulting in strict rationing. In the U.S., for instance, insurance tends to cover weight loss drugs for anyone with a BMI of 27 to 30 and an additional weight-related health condition. In the U.K., your BMI must hit 40, and you must have an additional four health conditions, to become eligible.
Creating a federal system to market cheaper drugs is a surefire way to make CEOs bend to the will of politicians. But Republicans will come to regret their party’s attempt to further centralize commerce. It’s easy to imagine a future Democratic president using the TrumpRx precedent to force companies to adhere to their own ideological agenda. That could be a disaster for innovation and consumer choice.
If Trump wants to stamp his name on something, let it be on a piece of legislation that cements incentives for companies to drop their prices, rather than a website that empowers him to pick and choose corporate winners.
ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/09/trumprx-weight-loss-drugs-glp1/
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Nov. 6
The Wall Street Journal says the FDA has been an embarrassment in Trump's second term
The Food and Drug Administration shouldn’t be in the news if it’s doing its job right. By that measure the FDA is failing in spectacular fashion. The agency this week is making news for all of the wrong reasons, and the dysfunction could have life and death consequences for patients.
The biotech firm UniQure on Monday reported that the FDA had moved the goalposts for approving its Huntington’s disease gene therapy. There are currently no approved drugs that can slow progression of the brutal neuro-degenerative disease, which afflicts about 40,000 Americans. The FDA in April designated UniQure’s treatment a “breakthrough therapy.”
The agency also previously said UniQure could apply for accelerated approval if its drug showed statistically significant benefits with three years of data, and its trial could include an external control group that didn’t receive a placebo. The gene therapy’s administration requires brain surgery, so a placebo arm isn’t practical.
UniQure reported in September that its treatment slowed progression by 75%. Hold the hallelujahs. UniQure said Monday that the “FDA currently no longer agrees that data” are “adequate” for approval. That means UniQure might have to run another trial with a placebo group, which could take several years, if it can even find patients who will volunteer to receive a placebo.
“This is a key shift from prior communications with the FDA” in multiple meetings over the past year, UniQure said. Join the club. As we’ve reported, Replimune, Capricor Therapeutics and others have disclosed that the FDA under Vinay Prasad, who leads the biologics and gene therapy division, has moved its benchmarks for approvals.
That means patients have to wait longer to get access to life-saving medicines. The FDA’s arbitrary and shifting standards also create uncertainty for drug development, which has been compounded by the agency’s recent chaos and dysfunction. Dr. Prasad has been cleaning house and consolidating power over drug-making authority.
On Sunday came news that George Tidmarsh, the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research chief, resigned after an ethics complaint from a former biotech business partner. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary tapped Dr. Tidmarsh in July to lead the division that oversees many drug reviews, and he was a bad choice from the start.
Dr. Tidmarsh shares Dr. Prasad’s regulatory paternalism. He has criticized the FDA’s past leaders for “endangering patients” by approving drugs that “gave them false hope,” and “cost vast amounts of money that our health case (sic) system can ill afford.” In September he called for a reappraisal of the FDA’s accelerated approval process.
“We have approved drugs with significant toxicity like vocolosporin (sic) that has not been shown to provide a direct clinical benefit for patients,” Dr. Tidmarsh posted on LinkedIn. The FDA approved voclosporin for lupus nephritis in 2021, and Dr. Tidmarsh furnished no evidence to support his claims that it is toxic or ineffective. He later deleted the post.
But his drive-by attack on voclosporin caused a plunge in the share price of Aurinia Pharmaceuticals, which makes the drug. Aurinia chairman Kevin Tang filed an ethics complaint with the government, which was followed by a lawsuit against Dr. Tidmarsh on Sunday. The lawsuit says Mr. Tang and Dr. Tidmarsh are former business partners.
Their relationship allegedly soured when Mr. Tang in 2019 asked Dr. Tidmarsh to resign as CEO of a biotech company that Mr. Tang chaired. The lawsuit alleges that Dr. Tidmarsh used his FDA position to continue a “personal vendetta” against Mr. Tang. This included taking regulatory action in August that hurt a company partly owned by Mr. Tang, American Laboratories.
The lawsuit says Dr. Tidmarsh’s personal attorney then requested that Mr. Tang extend financial payments to a Tidmarsh-associated business entity. The letter from Dr. Tidmarsh’s attorney cites “issues” American Laboratories was experiencing. Mr. Tang claims he was being extorted. These are serious allegations, and Dr. Tidmarsh denies wrongdoing.
He says he was pushed out because of disagreements with Dr. Prasad over personnel and policy. Regardless, Dr. Tidmarsh’s social-media smear against Aurinia showed awful judgment, and the whiff of impropriety damages the FDA’s credibility. Ditto the FDA dysfunction, which is impeding the launch of life-saving drugs. The FDA was a success in Mr. Trump’s first term. So far it’s an embarrassment in the second.
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Nov. 5
The Guardian on Zohran Mamdani's election as mayor of New York City
Since the re-election of Donald Trump last November, a demoralised Democratic party has struggled to reverse a palpable sense of downward momentum. At a grassroots level, amid plunging poll ratings, there has been a yearning for renewal and a more punchy, combative approach in opposition. Against that bleak backdrop, the remarkable election of Zohran Mamdani to the New York City mayoralty is a moment for progressives to savour.
Mr Mamdani entered the mayoral race last October as a socialist outsider with almost zero name recognition. He won it with more than 50% of the vote after the highest turnout in more than half a century, and despite the best efforts of billionaires to bankroll his chief rival, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, to victory. That achievement makes him the youngest mayor of the US’s largest city for more than 100 years and the first Muslim to occupy the role.
New York is a traditional Democratic stronghold and is in no sense a national bellwether. Nevertheless, faced with a Maga movement that has based its success on the support of working-class voters, the Democratic party can learn much from Mr Mamdani’s extraordinary triumph. Leaving culture-war politics to his increasingly desperate opponents, he campaigned relentlessly and almost exclusively on the theme of affordability.
Charges of ideological extremism failed to stick because pledges of free childcare, free buses and a rent freeze spoke to an essentially social democratic message, offering public solutions to years of rising inequality. That vision persuaded a vast army of 100,000 volunteer canvassers to knock on millions of doors, more than offsetting Mr Cuomo’s far greater financial resources. The central insight was that values-driven opposition to Maga populism can succeed when supplemented by a positive offer to voters whose living standards have been steadily eroded.
On an uplifting night for Democrats, a similar pattern was seen in New Jersey and Virginia, where more centrist-leaning candidates won gubernatorial races by impressive margins. Cost-of-living pledges were again to the fore, including a proposed freeze on electricity prices and a focus on housing costs. California offered further grounds for a cautious rebirth of optimism; after Republican gerrymandering of congressional boundaries in Texas, voters backed countermeasures to redress the balance ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
As the Democratic party journeys through the wilderness of a second Trump term, it would be fanciful to believe that a corner has been definitively turned. For New York’s mayor-elect, the hard yards are yet to begin. Mr Trump has already threatened to withhold federal funds from an administration he will do his utmost to discredit, undermine and disrupt. More broadly, the reluctance of senior Democratic figures to endorse Mr Mamdani’s campaign confirms that internal divisions over strategy are a long way from being resolved.
However, it would be churlish to ignore green shoots of political recovery when they appear. As Mr Trump’s popularity sinks amid ongoing cost-of-living concerns and high inflation, the hollowness of Maga pledges to improve blue-collar living standards is a major zone of vulnerability. An emerging focus on affordability anchors Democrats in the preoccupations of their lost voters, as well as those who have remained loyal. By campaigning on that basis with elan and conviction, Mr Mamdani has blazed an inspiring trail.
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Nov. 10
The Houston Chronicle says MAGA voters should demand Trump put America first
The winds of war, and the manpower and machines to unleash them, are gathering rapidly around Venezuela.
In January 2003, this editorial board published those very words with one small difference. The sentence ended with “Persian Gulf.”
At the time, we were warning against the looming invasion of Iraq.
“President Bush, evidently on the verge of launching an attack on Iraq, has a moral responsibility to make a strong case for that path, a task he has not yet accomplished,” we wrote. “Debatable on its face, the case that a pre-emptive strike will make us safer in the long run simply has not been made.”
It was a tough call for a paper that had endorsed the then-governor in 2000. But it also didn’t stop us from endorsing him for reelection in 2004, guided by the need for a steady hand over Middle East policy and the weaknesses of his Democratic opponent.
Today’s supporters of President Donald Trump have the opportunity to make a similarly tough but necessary call and tell Trump to stand down in his unilateral escalation of force against Venezuela.
Because the White House is escalating our military presence in the Caribbean, slowly drawing our nation into a war without authorization from Congress, justification to the public, or any sense of how it would win the peace.
The military has already started attacking civilian boats it claims without clear evidence are part of a “ narcoterrorist ” operation, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the White House’s real goal is regime change in Venezuela.
More than 10,000 troops and aircraft have been dispatched across the region, and last month the Pentagon ordered the Navy’s most advanced aircraft carrier to the Caribbean from the Mediterranean. The Trump administration has also authorized the CIA to engage in covert activity there.
This is nowhere near the scale of the international coalition that invaded Iraq, but Americans know well how supposedly limited military operations can spiral out of control. Are Trump supporters really ready for the next Battle of Mogadishu or Benghanzi?
Amid this sabre rattling, Reuters reports that basic information about the plan forward is being kept secret from the American people. The fact that Admiral Alvin Holsey, the military leader overseeing the U.S. Southern command, including operations in the Caribbean, unexpectedly resigned from his position only adds further questions about what the White House intends.
Because whatever happens in Venezuela, we know the consequences will be felt here in Houston. Whether it’s Texan troops asked to put their lives on the line, refugees streaming to the border to avoid bloodshed, or the downstream effects on our oil and gas industry, Houstonians know that chaos will make its way home.
Even if military operations are successful, there’s no reason to think it’ll stem the flow of dangerous opioids that have killed thousands of Americans. Venezuela may be involved in cocaine trade, but claims that the country produces or traffics fentanyl are just a Trump-era version of “weapons of mass destruction.”
At this point, we have to ask: Is this what Trump supporters voted for?
An administration that touted itself as the “ peace ticket ” is now marching toward a war of choice in Venezuela. The neoconservative agenda that Trump voters proudly rejected apparently is making a comeback.
Make no mistake: The world would be better off without Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in power. We remember when six executives at Houston-based Citgo — a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company — were held hostage by the Maduro-led government.
But like we said about Saddam Hussein at the time, the question is not whether the Venezuelan people, as well as the rest of the world, would be better served without Maduro’s brutal regime. The question is: What specific evidence is there of an imminent and uncontrollable threat for which there is no other recourse than war?
The lessons of Iraq should remind us that a military mission of liberation means a body count for the very people we supposedly want to help. And arbitrarily overthrowing a despot can be a self-inflicted wound on the United States, costing us more in blood and treasure and geopolitical influence than we could ever hope to gain.
Polls show that only 30 percent of Americans approve of the military buildup in Venezuela, and that number has been falling with each passing month. But that hasn’t halted Team Trump’s march to war, and they aren’t stopping at Venezuela. Last week, Trump himself threatened to take military action against Nigeria — “ guns-a-blazing ” — in response to terror attacks on Christians there.
So far, only two Republicans have directly opposed Trump’s growing military offensive in South America. Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky broke with their party last week to support an unsuccessful War Powers Act vote to halt the ongoing sea attacks.
Texas Republicans should ask their candidates in the Senate primary — Attorney General Ken Paxton, Rep. Wesley Hunt, and incumbent Sen. John Cornyn — where they stand on the White House’s neocon turn. Because plenty of other Republicans are cheering along, saying they want to “ liberate ” Venezuela. Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, for example, said he wanted to escalate but be finished “very, very quickly, probably within a matter of days.”
He might as well be borrowing talking points from 2003, back when Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld promised the war would be over in a matter of days or weeks or months at the most.
Back when we’d be greeted as liberators.
The formal war lasted until 2011, and we still have soldiers there to this day.
Trump and his administration have made it clear they have little interest in the opinions of Democrats, or even skeptical Republicans, which is why it falls on the true believers in the Trump coalition to speak up. After all, an arbitrary war in Venezuela would be the exact sort of reckless foreign policy that led them to demand America First in the first place.
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Nov. 9
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Trump's new refugee policy
Has there ever been a presidential administration more deeply defined by the personality traits of the sitting president than this one?
America knows Donald Trump well: His innate lack of empathy toward the weak, most recently demonstrated with his gutting of foreign food aid; a long history of racism, from his days as a redlining real estate mogul to his promotion of “birther” conspiracies to his presidential embrace of white nationalist supporters; a blithe contempt for the rule of law, which, like most rules, Trump thinks doesn’t apply to him.
All these traits are vividly on display with a new refugee policy that is at once racist, cruel and very likely illegal in how it’s being implemented. It’s also a repudiation of America’s long, proud stature as a beacon of hope to the world’s most vulnerable victims of persecution.
Under the new policy, announced late last month, the U.S. will limit annual acceptance of foreign refugees to just 7,500 people. That’s down from 125,000 last year and is the lowest limit in the 45-year history of the nation’s current refugee program.
No explanation has been publicly given for that drastic reduction. As usual, the administration announced the policy without even consulting Congress, a seemingly blatant violation of a law requiring such consultation.
And — in what literally sounds like the punchline of an anti-Trump joke — most of those precious few spots are being set aside for white South Afrikaners, who don’t even fit the standard definition of “refugees.”
Refugees are people who flee their home countries in demonstrable fear of persecution. Historically, they have been from war-torn countries or those with oppressive policies toward ethnic or religious minorities: Iraq, Ukraine, various African and Latin American governments.
The refugee program isn’t about border issues or asylum-seekers who are already here. Refugees are vetted and approved before they are brought in, generally from foreign refugee camps or other enclaves of the persecuted.
In that sense, the fixation on Afrikaners is not just racist but nonsensical. As a population, Afrikaners haven’t fled their country and in fact there’s precious little evidence of the administration’s claims they face racial persecution by the Black-majority government. As The New York Times recently reported, South African police data doesn’t indicate whites are more likely to be crime victims than Blacks. Other data shows that, even now, decades after the end of white-minority rule and apartheid, average white Afrikaners still enjoy economic advantages over average Black citizens.
For actual refugees, look to Afghanistan, where some citizens who aided the U.S. during our war there now face persecution and possibly death for that assistance.
Yet not only are those refugees being denied the kind of special carve-out being offered to Afrikaners, but the administration earlier this year ended special humanitarian protections that had been created for Afghans who had already settled in the U.S.
That means these people whose lives are in danger for helping America are now vulnerable to possible deportation back into the clutches of the Taliban. Trump clearly feels no shame at that betrayal, but every other American should.
The administration says it didn’t consult Congress about the miserly new refugee policy in advance, as is required, because it was announced after the government shutdown, and that it will consult when the government reopens. That’s not consultation, that’s telling a co-equal branch of government after the fact that you’ve already done something you had no authority to unilaterally do.
Most Americans who supported Trump last November were voting for lower inflation and a secure border. What they’ve largely gotten instead are federal troops on American streets, tariff-driven market chaos and an openly politicized and abusive Justice Department.
And, now, a refugee policy that spurns this nation’s just and generous nature in favor of a stingy, cruel, racist slamming of the door in the faces of the world’s most vulnerable victims. That may be consistent with Trump’s character, but not with America’s.
ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_366a6b09-3d3d-4193-a734-6f88f5e890e3.html
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