Max Nisen, Columnist

Biopharma Can't Keep Getting Blindsided by Trump

His latest attack shows drug-pricing troubles are far from over.

January 11, 2017 at 8:01 PM UTC

Max Nisen is a healthcare analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. He previously wrote for Bloomberg Opinion, Quartz and Business Insider.

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The day after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, pharma and biotech investors seemed to decide his administration would be one in which scrutiny of drug pricing would vanish and profits would soar. Shares in the Nasdaq Biotech Index (NBI) surged more on November 9 than they had in more than eight years.

This dream was a fiction. An early clue was a Time magazine interview in December, when Trump pledged to bring down drug prices, a warning that took 3 percent off the NBI. Then, in a press conference on Wednesday, Trump accused the industry of "getting away with murder" and pledged to save billions of dollars in government health-care spending by forcing companies to bid for business. That caused the NBI to immediately drop another 3 percent.