On July 21, President Donald Trump announced his latest set of sweeping tariffs on the pharmaceutical industry: a 200% levy on imported generic drugs by the year 2029.
Trump imposed tariffs on branded drugs in April, which were met with concern about increased drug costs and decreased U.S. competitiveness in the global drug development market. However, a more dire concern—a familiar one—is arising now that tariffs are extended to generics: Shortages.
At the time of the announcement, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor with The Cancer Letter, wrote a story about the news with expert commentary from Marta Wosińska, a healthcare economist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Center on Health Policy. In this episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Jacquelyn speaks with Wosińska to drill deeper into the potential implications of Trump’s new tariffs on generic oncology drugs.
In the conversation, Wosińska explains how tariffs will likely not be able to achieve the goals Trump hopes.
“This is yet another wrinkle in a really unstable system,” Wosińska said. “And whether or not tariffs are playing into this—and tariffs could potentially make things more challenging, you know. Onshoring is not necessarily going to solve our problem, because we have already a lot of domestic manufacturing, and it's really not a domestic versus foreign problem.”
The problem is much more complicated, and shortages—particularly of generic drugs like platinum-based chemotherapies—are a persistent, crippling, and sometimes deadly problem in oncology.
“What we do have is a very fragile system that's not reliable,” Wosińska said. “So, you know, setting tariffs aside, we have a broken system and we have to repair that system.”
Stories mentioned in this podcast include:
A transcript of this podcast is available: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/20260826-tariffs/
