Donald Trump and Pfizer Albert Bourla Join Hands: “Historic Agreement”. From Warp Speed to TrumpRx: The Pharma State Marches On
By Michael Bryant
Global Research
At a press conference in the Oval Office last week, President Donald Trump and Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla joined hands and proudly made a joint announcement. The news they released is now being billed as an “historic agreement” that will “ensure U.S. patients pay lower prices for their prescription medicines while strengthening America’s role as the global leader in biopharmaceutical innovation.”
Also present at the big reveal in the White House were Vice President JD Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Their September 30th meeting sent shock waves throughout the MAGA-MAHA health freedom universe. Many of the movement’s supporters expressed disappointment that President Trump would meet with Pfizer head Bourla, who is one of the primary architects of the insidious and life-threatening covid injections. They were outraged, too, that the President struck a deal with a company whose portfolio of corporate crimes rivals that of the most corrupt and heavily fined companies in history.
While these appropriate moans and groans of disgust over what appears to be a colossal betrayal were echoing far and wide, more seasoned observers who are armed with historical details were not as caught off guard by the deal-making done by the two chief administrators.
Let’s lay some of that history on the table. For starters, this wasn’t the first meeting between President Trump and Pfizer CEO Bourla. Back on December 4, 2024, then President-elect Donald Trump and HHS nominee RFK Jr. held a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Bourla and Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks and Steve Ubl, CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). It was reported that at this dinner the discussion focused on “how the public and private sectors can collaborate on finding cures for cancer and other issues.”
Such public-private partnerships are known to be Trojan horses that are wheeled in to siphon off public assets for the benefit of private investors. As we shall see, this latest Faustian bargain between Pfizer Inc. and Trump Inc. is another in a long line of bipartisan policies that will likely do just that.
The Face of the Deal
The deal announced last Tuesday is being sold to the public as a pact to lower drug prices for Medicaid patients using a new TrumpRx.gov website that is allied with Pfizer.
One newspaper reporter who covers national politics writes:
“Under the agreement, each state’s Medicaid program will have access to Pfizer products offered at the lowest paid price by other countries. According to the White House, the agreement will ensure that foreign countries can ‘no longer use price controls to free ride on American innovation.’”
The article by reporter Lauren Irwin of the Deseret News continues:
“It will require Pfizer to offer medications ‘at a deep discount off the list price’ when selling directly to American patients, the White House said.
“Pfizer will be selling medications directly to American consumers on a new website called ‘TrumpRx.’ The site will be operated by the federal government.”
Critics of the arrangement suggest that the practical realities of how these cuts will manifest differ markedly from how the cuts are being touted.
For example, NPR says that, according to one government official, TrumpRx’s lower prices will be accessible only for patients not using their health insurance. Also, because these discounted medicines are based on high list prices, the drugs might still not be affordable to Medicare patients, the official said.
Ameet Sarpatwari, an assistant professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School who specializes in pharmaceutical policy, told NPR,
“Consumers with health insurance could very well pay less at the pharmacy counter. As a result, the average consumer likely will not benefit from the Trump administration’s deal.”
Pfizer has already discounted its drugs for Medicaid patients. Thus, the low prices stipulated in the deal may not make that much difference to seniors. And, since most people have health insurance plans that come with lower out-of-pocket costs, the number of people who buy Pfizer’s drugs directly at discounted rates on the TrumpRx website may be negligible.
“It is an environment where you can pretend to make significant changes that actually don’t meaningfully improve the prices that Americans will pay for their drugs,” Sarpatwari said.
Frankly, it’s still unclear how much consumers will benefit from the Trump-Bourla bargain or how much money taxpayers will save. Neither the White House nor Pfizer has provided any further details about the deal since their Oval Office presentation.
In fact, a Pfizer press release admits, “Specific terms of the agreement remain confidential.”
A little conjecturing could lead to the conclusion that, based on the way biopharmaceutical stocks soared after the announcement, the deal is being seen, at least by Wall Street, “as a possible template for the rest of the pharmaceutical industry.” Notably, not only Pfizer stock but also shares of Eli Lilly, Thermo Fisher, Merck & Co. and Amgen logged double-digit gains in the week after the announcement. Moreover, Trump has indicated he will be “making deals with all of them“—”them” meaning the large pharma and biopharma companies.
Pfizer is notorious for not disclosing information that the government and consumers need to know. Then, once that information comes to light, it has been found to be appalling—and criminal.
Most recently, Pfizer hid the many thousands of deaths that were attributed to its so-called covid vaccines. It also withheld other pertinent information related to those vaccines. And notably millions of pages of documents related to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines were being concealed from the public by the FDA until a successful lawsuit from the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) forced their release.
In addition, Pfizer has been called out for concealing covid-shot contracts with countries all over the world—and for demanding those countries put up their national assets as collateral.
As for Pfizer’s latest ploy, watchdog group Public Citizen has sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the appropriate federal agencies for the purpose of obtaining a copy of the text of the Trump-Pfizer deal. Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program, said in a statement:
“So much for ‘radical transparency.’ Trump is substituting secret deal making for health policy. The Trump-Pfizer announcement has raised more questions than it answered. The deal’s secrecy makes it impossible to determine its effectiveness in lowering some drug prices, and that may be intentional. Prescription drug corporations are experts at gaming pricing rules. Secret deals with Big Pharma are a bad way to make health policy, and Trump says he is planning more of them. The White House must publish the text of the Pfizer deal, so Americans know what they are getting.”
So far, this deal hasn’t been a good look for an administration that once hung its hat on a commitment to “radical transparency.”
Men in Suits
“I was honored to have Albert [Bourla here]. . . . He’s done a fantastic job with . . . COVID. He did a fantastic job with a lot of things. He’s a leader. And Pfizer is right at the top.” — Donald Trump 9/30/2025
Now that we’ve been reminded of Trump’s over-the-top statement about Bourla, it’s worth remembering that Donald J. Trump is the Godfather of Operation Warp Speed, which was officially announced on May 15, 2020, and which developed, manufactured and distributed the very first mRNA “injections.” Some say that the President should have received a Nobel Peace Prize for that effort. Others say Operation Warp Speed, a partnership between HHS and the Department of Defense, was a covert bioweapons program that slaughtered and maimed millions of Americans.
It’s also worth remembering that Albert Bourla, the man Trump praises, is known to have called people who pushed back on the covid vaccine narrative “criminals.”
And it’s also worth remembering that on May 30, 2023, RFK Jr. pointed out in an “X” post that “Donald Trump owns stock in Pfizer and J&J, who bought fancy tickets to his inauguration and placed pharma shills high in his administration. That’s how Washington works. It is not the exception, but the rule. It is a form of legalized bribery.”
Four months earlier, RFK Jr. had posted an even more explicit criticism of Pfizer, observing on January 26, 2023:
“Pfizer is a craven venal homicidal morally bankrupt criminal enterprise that has captured and corrupted its regulators.”
Cui Bono?
When boardroom deals are made Bin DC, there is the superficial face of the deal sold to the public, and then there are the hard realities of what that transaction entails.
And, as they say, “the devil is in the details.” But how are we to parse this latest Beltway bargain, whose details are being concealed? The secrecy surrounding it is an obvious clue that we might be watching a shakedown, particularly given the track record of the parties involved.
There’s yet another tried-and-true way to gain accurate insights on an event that is light on details: Follow the money.
To do just that, we can look at Substack writer Jon Fleetwood’s October 1st article, which takes a peek at how the Pfizer’s tariff exemption will impact its business profile. Fleetwood wrote:
“Pfizer, a World Economic Forum partner, secured a three-year exemption from Section 232 tariffs, conditional on more U.S.-based manufacturing. This removes one of the biggest threats to the company’s global operations.
“The pharmaceutical sector has warned that Section 232 tariffs could add 5–15% costs on imported raw materials, active ingredients, and finished drug products.
“For Pfizer, with $60 billion in annual revenues and roughly 40% of its products tied to global supply chains, that protection translates to billions in avoided costs over the next three years.
“Even at the conservative end—assuming tariffs at 5% on just $20 billion of imports—Pfizer would be shielded from at least $1 billion per year in penalties. At the higher estimates, the exemption could be worth $2–3 billion annually.
“By removing tariff exposure, the Trump Administration handed Pfizer a guaranteed multibillion-dollar cushion while boosting its investor security and market valuation overnight.” [Emphasis added.]
To the delight of its shareholders, Pfizer stock jumped nearly 15% immediately following the deal’s announcement. And just who might those shareholders be?
Institutional investors hold 67.74% of Pfizer’s total shares outstanding. The top institutional shareholders as of the end of 2024 were Vanguard Group, BlackRock Inc. (authors of the covid bailout plan—aka “Going Direct”), and State Street Corp.
Specifically, Vanguard Group held more than 518 million shares of Pfizer as of December 31, 2024. BlackRock owned 432.5 million Pfizer shares as of the end of 2024. And State Street held more than 290 million shares of Pfizer as of the end of 2024.
The three top individual/insider shareholders in Pfizer are Albert Bourla, former Chief Scientific Officer Mikael Dolsten and Chief Legal Officer Douglas Lanker. Bourla held 316,799 shares of Pfizer as of the company’s 2024 proxy statement.
As for Bourla’s promise,
“We [Pfizer] are ready to invest . . . $70 billion in the next few years from Pfizer in manufacturing and research in America alone . . . [for] CANCER TREATMENTS . . . [and for] BETTER VACCINES,” we must keep in mind that this announcement comes on the heels of a massive 8.4 million-person South Korean study that shows COVID-19 mRNA vaccines like Pfizer’s were tied to a wave of cancers one year after the vaccines were injected. [Emphasis added.]
In any case, the thought of Pfizer being installed as a primary manufacturing hub for pharmaceutical products in the US is not exactly a comforting one. Not to mention that Pfizer’s “generosity” is a bit overstated: The company was already planning to spend $70 billion toward US manufacturing, points out BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan David Seigerman.
Given that Pfizer currently manufactures its mRNA COVID vaccine, Comirnaty, at facilities in Andover, Massachusetts, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, and given that Pfizer just released its updated 2025–2026 formulas in August, there is every reason to believe this $70 billion investment did indeed already include continued and expanded mRNA vaccine production on American soil.
Of note, the Pfizer-Trump deal aligns with other biopharma investments whose deals were struck earlier in the year:
- March 21 — J&J announces $55 billion US investment between now and 2030
- May 7 — Gilead announces $32 billion US investment between now and 2030
- July 21 — AstraZeneca announces $50 billion US investment between now and 2030
- September 17 — GSK announces $30 billion US investment between now and 2030
Also, Amgen, ever since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, has committed to invest $40 in US manufacturing and R&D by 2030.
Taking Stock
Presented with an administration that claims to champion “Make America Healthy Again” but that is now collaborating with a company holding the dubious distinction of paying the largest criminal fine in American history, health freedom advocates are justifiably up in arms.
They demand to know: Instead of shaking hands and celebrating the “accomplishments” of Albert Bourla and instead of providing Pfizer with guarantees and political protection, shouldn’t President Trump be investigating both the pharma giant and its chief executive for possible criminal actions made during the covid era?
That question can be asked from now until kingdom come. But the sad fact is, that prospect is almost certainly a dead letter, given that Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, once provided legal services to Pfizer while working as counsel to the law firm Panza, Maurer & Maynard. Bondi did not disclose this potential conflict of interest on her Senate questionnaire or during her appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The message we’re being sent by Washington seems obvious. Rather than being made accountable for pushing its mRNA injections on US citizens while concealing information and while reaping massive financial rewards from its calamitous covid vaccine program, Pfizer will instead gain further financial rewards from the US government and be allowed to expand its mRNA empire.
Might this be (yet another) object lesson teaching us that Red versus Blue elected officials are instruments of competing squads of billionaires? And that their “sides” only seem to be in competition with each other? And that the primary interest of all the Red versus Blue politicians is the same: Pleasing their big donors and their corporate cronies?
Might this also be (yet another) object lesson teaching us that the two political parties, Republican and Democrat alike, are controlled by millionaires, lobbyists, fundraisers, careerist apparatchiks, consultants, and corporate lawyers and thus are unlikely to advance policies—including drug deals—that benefit the public?
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This article was originally published on Health Freedom Defense Fund.
Michael Bryant is a freelance journalist/activist and researcher who presently focuses primarily on issues surrounding health freedom. His work has appeared on HealthFreedomDefense.org. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from HFDF
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/warp-speed-trumprx-pharma-state-marches/5902400