After U.S. President Donald Trump took the stage at the World Economic Forum this week to tout the supposed success of his tariff-tinged trade negotiations, the French presidency has pushed back against a drug pricing claim that it’s branding “fake news.”
During Trump’s speech at the conference in Davos, Switzerland, the president covered a range of topics, from U.S. national security and his desire for Greenland to the success of the that he has wielded against much of the world since taking office again last January.
At one point, Trump alleged that he had pressured France’s president Emmanuel Macron into hiking the price of an unspecified pill in the country under threat of a 25% tariff on most French exports, plus a 100% duty on French wines and champagnes.
Trump further suggested that Macron quickly caved under this pressure campaign, noting that it took him “on average three minutes a country” to hash out new drug pricing frameworks under his most-favored-nation policy.
But the official X account for the Élysée—the French presidential palace—was quick to rebut Trump’s claims on Wednesday.
“It’s being claimed that President [Emmanuel Macron] increased the price of medicines,” the post begins. “He does not set their prices. They are regulated by the social security system and have, in fact, remained stable.”
“Anyone who has set foot in a French pharmacy knows this,” the post continued, before including a GIF of Trump saying, “fake news.”
Trump's MFN framework essentially seeks to balance the prices paid for medicines in the U.S. with those in other comparable developed nations. Trump has jockeyed for drugmakers to lower their prices in the U.S. and argued wealthier European countries should pay their fair share for biopharma innovation, too.
As for the broader status of major pharma companies’ planned drug price increases in Europe, things appear to be a bit clearer heading into 2026, though not without some potential challenges on the horizon.
There are “eight countries outside the U.S. that are effected by MFN,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Ph.D., said at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco earlier this month. He noted that among those eight “high-income countries,” the U.K. has already inked a deal with the U.S. to increase its spending on innovative medicines.
“I will tell you that they [the U.K.] are reducing their clawback from something like 22% to 15%, so it's a significant reduction,” Bourla said during the Q&A portion of his company’s JPM presentation, referring to the U.K. rebate rate agreement reached in December.
Bourla added that he’s in “constant discussions” on the pricing topic with leaders in countries like France and Germany, arguing that Europe “missed the train” on biopharma investment and now needs to “come back.”
Those countries affected by MFN “understand that with a new system, unless if they pay, they won't see the products launched in their countries,” Bourla continued.
Under its trade deal with the U.S.—announced in early December—the U.K. won an exemption from U.S. import tariffs on domestic pharmaceuticals, drug ingredients and medtech products for at least three years. In exchange, the U.K. pledged for its National Health Service to increase the net price it pays for novel drugs by 25%, among other measures.
So far, Big Pharmas that have signed MFN deals with the White House include AbbVie, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Merck KGaA’s EMD Serono, Roche’s Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer and Sanofi. Regeneron is also expected to strike a deal, but the New York drugmaker has not yet done so.
Meanwhile, implementing those higher European prices may be easier said than done, with experts telling Reuters earlier this month that tougher negotiations on the part of European governments could stall the rollout of new drugs in the bloc.
"You can't force the Europeans to just all of a sudden spend more," Marshall Gordon, a senior healthcare research analyst at ClearBridge Investments, told the outlet, caveating that the MFN deals “do actually give the companies negotiating power.”
Countries in Europe pay on average around one-third less than the U.S. for drugs thanks to the presence of national health systems that bargain for medicine costs and may delay purchasing to get a better deal, Reuters explained.
Many drugmakers have come out in favor of raising the prices of their medicines overseas.
Back in September, Bristol Myers Squibb revealed that it would launch its new schizophrenia treatment Cobenfy "at a UK list price equal to the US list price." The drug costs $1,887 in the U.S. before rebates and discounts, according to a BMS website.
Separately, AbbVie that same month unveiled a similar U.K. pricing strategy for the British launch of its cancer medicine Elahere.
"AbbVie is in discussions with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to ensure that Elahere, which will address a significant unmet need among women suffering from ovarian cancer, is valued fairly," the company explained in a Sept. 29, 2025, press release. "The value given to Elahere will determine the ability to launch in the U.K."
Sunday, the Financial Times reported that several pharma executives were quietly considering whether to stall or delay launches in Europe over pricing negotiations.
Trump and Macron’s barbs over French drug prices—and the wider conversation about raising medicine prices in Europe—come a little over a month after European legislators reached a deal for a major overhaul of the bloc’s pharma policies. The package seeks to bolster policies around market protection, shortage prevention and regulation in a bid to drive biopharma investment back to the continent.
Still, certain organizations, such as European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, argued that the deal doesn’t go far enough, noting in a release late last year that to compete in 2026 and beyond, Europe “requires policies that can halt the negative trends of previous years while also countering the fallout of recent global pricing and trade policies, ensuring that we can continue to lead global innovation in medicines and vaccines.”