President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to impose up to 200% tariffs on pharmaceuticals on pharmaceutical tariffs “will come at the end of the month,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC after the Cabinet meeting.
The president has repeatedly threatened and then changed course on tariff proposals, so there’s no guarantee he will set pharmaceutical tariffs at the 200% rate. Pharmaceutical stocks were largely unchanged following Trump’s comments.
It is Trump’s most significant comment on pharmaceutical-specific tariffs since April, when his administration initiated a so-called Section 232 investigation on those products. That legal authority allows the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the impact of imports on national security. imported into the U.S. “very soon.”
“They’re going to be tariffs at very high rate, like 200%,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting.
But he suggested that those levies would not go into effect immediately, saying he will “give people about a year, year and a half.”
“We’ll give them a certain period of time to get their act together,” Trump said, apparently referring to drugmakers bringing back manufacturing into the U.S.
