If you had any doubt about the “vibe shift” in 2025 Washington, look no further than the impact the Make America Healthy Again movement has had on pharmaceutical innovation and the corporations responsible for it.
When the Biden administration explored manipulating decades-old legislation to seize pharmaceutical patents in December 2023, pioneering drug companies, free marketeers, and intellectual property rights advocates vigorously resisted the move.
The president sought to exploit a never-before-used provision of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, a landmark measure that has massively juiced innovation in the life sciences, that grants the government “march-in rights” to assume a royalty-free license for drug discoveries that companies have failed to commercialize.
Presumably as a populist measure, in the face of rising drug prices and an impending election, the administration filed a request for information seeking public comment about whether the government should exercise march-in rights, including in scenarios in which a “combination of the limited supply and increased prices has resulted in a health emergency that cannot be adequately addressed without expanding capacity.”
At this proposed unprecedented use of executive power, Republicans justifiably pounced. “This kind of short-sighted decision would kill American healthcare innovation and deny millions of Americans future lifesaving cures and treatments,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a doctor and the ranking member at the time of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, in a press release. “As a doctor, I know that lives that could be saved will be lost if President Biden takes this action.”
Other government officials, including former secretaries of commerce from both parties and directors of the Patent and Trademark Office, echoed Cassidy’s concerns. “We believe the adoption of the Draft Framework would destabilize our nation’s entire technology transfer system which is central to U.S. innovation,” the group wrote in a letter to then-President Joe Biden, “and we thus implore you to withdraw the framework in its entirety.”
The companies developing lifesaving and life-enhancing medicines, as well as groups advocating patent rights, expressed similar alarm and outrage.
“The administration’s proposal would empower federal bureaucrats to second-guess the business strategy and adequacy of a licensee’s marketplace progress rather than the research institute that actually developed the technology and understands it better,” the Council for Innovation Promotion wrote in a statement. “Under the administration’s proposal, some large market incumbents (including foreign entities with U.S. operations) will be permitted to regularly petition the government to march-in and transfer patents to these incumbents. This will hurt the small companies and start-ups that are the biggest licensees of federally-funded patents and that take the risk of developing federally-funded inventions.”
But shortly after his election, President Donald Trump announced an avowed foe of the pharmaceutical industry and a longtime advocate of exercising march-in rights would become his nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, and the reaction was … different.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s opposition to lifesaving innovations and the companies that developed them is legendary among his friends and foes. His opposition to widespread vaccination — most prominently for childhood diseases, including polio, as well as COVID-19 — earned him his reputation, however spurious and destructive some of his claims were. His occasionally extreme positions prompted even his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy, to denounce him forcefully. That a Republican administration would select a nominee bearing such hostility toward a key driver of economic growth astounded many.
And sure enough, at the time of his nomination hearings, Politico reported that during private meetings with senators, Kennedy “indicated he’d consider authorizing the government to seize the patents of high-priced medicines from manufacturers and share them with other drug makers as a way to force down costs.” According to Joe Allen, the executive director of the Bayh-Dole Coalition, a group “committed to celebrating and protecting the Bayh-Dole Act” and “informing policymakers and the public of its many benefits, “we heard that Mr. Kennedy had said things about Bayh-Dole which we didn’t support.”
According to some reports, however, Kennedy apparently later said behind closed doors that seizing pharma patents to lower drug prices “would not be an appropriate use of march-in rights under Bayh-Dole.” Kennedy later echoed this commitment in his written response to the Senate Finance Committee’s questions for the record.
Ultimately, Kennedy’s performance during his confirmation hearings, while shaky at times, sufficed to earn the support of 52 senators — all Republicans, minus Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who suffered from polio as a child. Among his backers was none other than Cassidy, who had so vigorously opposed Biden’s march-in gambit. Cassidy credited “intense conversations” with the nominee during which Kennedy promised to “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendations without changes.”
Kennedy’s march-in commitment has satisfied at least some who have otherwise been concerned about the incoming secretary’s possible exploitation of march-in rights. “I do take him at his word,” Allen told me. “It’s in writing to the Finance Committee.” Allen, who served as a staffer in the office of the legislation’s namesake, former Sen. Birch Bayh, at the time of its passage, noted that “the first Trump administration were very strong proponents of the Bayh-Dole Act, which basically decentralizes technology management out of Washington to the people making inventions and get[s] the bureaucracy out of the way. … Donald Trump was great on Bayh-Dole.” Allen remains “hopeful” that the new administration will repeal its predecessor’s framework, which is still pending.
Similarly, as Frank Cullen, the executive director of the Council for Innovation Promotion, told me, “We’re very encouraged that the incoming administration will move away from some of the misguided proposals and policies of the past administration and will also continue policies or even expand policies that will allow our bio Pharma sector to continue to lead.” Cullen said his group, which promotes “strong and effective intellectual property rights that drive innovation,” is “very much looking forward to working with the Trump administration and with Secretary Kennedy on issues to make sure that there’s a fact-based discussion.”
Yet the new secretary’s brief against pharma extends beyond vaccines and patents. Life science executives sounded worried in the wake of the election, as Kennedy’s seemingly inevitable nomination began to loom and he targeted the Food and Drug Administration. “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” Kennedy announced on X in late October. He blamed the agency for suppressing “anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma,” threatening that “if you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.” (At the time, Trump was reportedly considering appointing Kennedy as FDA commissioner, but he decided to elevate Kennedy to an even higher role as HHS secretary.)
In addition, Kennedy vowed before the election to persuade the president to ban pharmaceutical advertising “in order to correct the chronic disease epidemic.” And in his written response to the Senate Finance Committee’s questions, he asserted that the “FDA should promote prescription drug competition to bring down drug costs for the American public,” arguing that “for too long, the pharmaceutical industry has worked to game the system to delay generic and biosimilar competition.”
Needless to say, pharmaceutical companies were not pleased. “My hope, my belief, is people will see the good work the FDA is doing today and continue to reinforce this,” Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, told Reuters in November. “The FDA has really been for many years not only the reference in terms of regulatory authority in the world but also the most innovative and the fastest in approving medicines that really are differentiated.”
Similarly, Jeremy Levin, CEO of Ovid Therapeutics, cautioned that “putting somebody in charge of any public health service who is a vaccine denier puts at risk the stability of the nation at large.”
Even consumer advocacy groups that are generally hostile to Big Pharma expressed skepticism about Kennedy’s plans. “I think when Robert Kennedy talks about fighting corruption and Big Pharma monopolies, that is going to translate into reducing standards at FDA to enable the authorization and promotion of ineffective and dubious therapies, drugs, herbs, whatever,” Robert Weissman, co-president of the liberal group Public Citizen, told Wired.
It’s not just Kennedy, of course, but the MAHA movement he has spearheaded. According to the Washington Post, Kennedy sought in December to trademark the phrase “Make America Healthy Again,” a few months after earning $100,000 from the commercial use of the term. His former staffers formed a PAC that aims to “channel the unwavering energy of the health freedom movement into a powerful political force for change.” MAHA Action aims, among other things, for “increased transparency and accountability for pharmaceutical companies.” Meanwhile, several senators, including Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), and Rick Scott (R-FL), along with two House members, Reps. John Joyce (R-PA) and Lloyd Smucker (R-PA), comprise the newly established Make America Healthy Again Caucus.
On her Honestly podcast, Free Press founder Bari Weiss hosted a panel of self-identified “MAHA whisperers” to discuss the Kennedy nomination and what it would mean for pharma. Calley Means, the founder of Truemed, a website hawking fitness, supplements, cold plunges, and other “health tech,” and a co-author of Good Energy, labeled pharma companies such as Merck and GlaxoSmithKline “criminal enterprises” and observed that “right now, there are 72 pharmaceutical interventions for every child.” Blaming the profit motive for the supposedly unwarranted proliferation of vaccines, Means insisted that “we can subject the pharmaceutical industry to continued rigor and science. There’s no reason not to. That is what Bobby Kennedy is saying.”
For now, advocacy groups are keeping their powder dry, projecting optimism about the course that HHS is charting. Allen expects, or at least hopes, that cooler heads are already prevailing at the department, advising their principal that pharma companies have much to offer. “I think when he got out there,” Allen told me, “you start talking to the people, and they’re saying, ‘Hey, Mr. Secretary, you know, without partnerships [with industry], you don’t have a COVID vaccine, and you don’t have a cancer cure.’”
For his part, C4IP’s Cullen praised Kennedy “for his attention to obesity and chronic conditions” and conceded that “it’s very understandable that any person who is looking at the current state of health in the United States would want to see an improvement.” But his group is focused on reorienting policymakers and the public away from “mischaracterizations” of pharma. “The fundamental role of the research and development ecosystem is to provide lifesaving new cures and treatments,” he emphasized.
Along similar lines, during the Kennedy nomination battle, the prominent conservative writer Erick Erickson took to the pages of the Free Press to argue that “Big Pharma saved my life.” Both Erickson and his wife survived terrible illnesses thanks to lifesaving medicines. “Without innovative drugs developed with great scientific skill at tremendous cost by the pharmaceutical industry, my family and I would not be here today,” he wrote.
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Yet, on Feb. 18, Kennedy pledged to explore changing the childhood vaccine schedule for polio, measles, and other deadly diseases. “Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy said, in apparent violation of the specific assurance he gave Cassidy.
In the end, nobody, on the Right or the Left, is obliged to love Big Pharma. They’re not “altruistic heroes,” as Erickson acknowledges. They’re profit-maximizing firms. But, as Erickson puts it, “profits are the reward for risking capital and producing something of great value.” If Kennedy and his MAHA cohort fail to appreciate the tremendously valuable innovation that our life science companies produce, America surely will not be healthy again.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of the forthcoming book Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.