The Health Secretary Wes Streeting said on Tuesday that the supply of medicines in the UK could be adversely affected by tariffs imposed by the US.
However, US pharmaceutical giants could still be forced to put up their prices to deal with rises in their own manufacturing costs from wider trade barriers, health experts warned.
Dayan said most of the UK’s bulk supply of generic medicines – which many companies can manufacture once a patent expires – comes from the EU and Asia.
“These might be where you would see any price issues and disruption. The extent to which it will feed through is really difficult to tell. It would be disproportionately likely to affect [NHS] secondary care, the medicines the NHS is buying.”
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The US is a key producer of branded medications – which tend to be the latest drugs on the market and are patented by pharmaceutical firms to prevent them from being copied for a period of time.
One example is Sotorasib, a drug proven during trials to prevent lung cancer from growing for seven months, which has been available on the NHS since 2022 following a confidential deal struck with US giant Amgen.
However, experts said it was difficult to predict which particular drugs could be hit by higher prices and shortages in future.
With Trump expressing his desire to ramp up domestic drug production, US companies with factories overseas could decide to bring back some operations to the US.
He added: “The NHS has a limited budget, so anything that adds to cost will make things worse. We just don’t know what the disruption will be. It’s much too complicated to disentangle which products will be affected.”
But Dayan said it was too early to say which specific US drugs could be disrupted by Trump’s tariffs.
“There’s no reason to think the medicines exposed to disruption from previous factors will be the ones most exposed again,” said Dayan. “A shock based in the US won’t necessarily be the same as the impact of Covid-19, or the war in Ukraine, or Brexit.”
“If US tariffs were imposed on pharmaceuticals as President Trump has threatened, and countries around the world started to retaliate in kind, it would be driving up costs all over the world,” says Dayan.
Asked about supply disruption, the Health Secretary told Sky News: “There have been challenges in terms of manufacturing, challenges in terms of distribution, and if we start to see tariffs kicking in, that’s another layer of challenge, but we watch this situation extremely closely.”
Samuels called on Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers to do more for UK drug manufacturers so the country was less dependent on imports.
The Government declined to comment.
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