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The White House will slash prices for obesity drugs for patients by hundreds of dollars after striking a landmark deal with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
At an event at the White House on Thursday, Donald Trump and administration officials said the list price for shots of Novo’s Ozempic and Wegovy would drop from at least $1,000 a month to $350 when bought through TrumpRx, the president’s new website that is scheduled to launch in early 2026.
Denmark-based Novo said the agreement would hurt its revenues and have a “negative, low single-digit impact on global sales growth in 2026”, the company said. However, the deal includes a three-year exemption from potential Trump tariffs, it added.
For Lilly, the price of its weight-loss drug Zepbound would drop to an average of $346 a month from about $1,086, the White House said. The company said the price cut only applies to the lowest dose of the treatment, which corresponds to less weight loss for patients.
To win the drugmakers’ participation, the US Food and Drug Administration awarded the duo accelerated regulatory review for their hotly anticipated oral weight-loss medicines. Investors hope weight-loss pills will broaden the sales to more people and will be cheaper to manufacture. The White House said Lilly’s pill would cost $346 a month when purchased through TrumpRx, and future pills would be priced at $149 a month.
The White House said it was also lowering the cost of weight-loss drugs for Americans enrolled in the government healthcare plans Medicare and Medicaid. The administration said this would save money for states, which have been spending billions of dollars as weight-loss drugs have become more popular. Medicare patients would have to pay $50 a month for these drugs starting around July 2026, the White House said.
The longer-term consequences of these deals will be manageable for Novo and Lilly, analysts said on Thursday. The list prices for the weight-loss drugs Trump highlighted are different from the net prices drugmakers negotiate with insurance companies. This means the cost savings to patients might not be as dramatic as the White House said, according to analysts.
Evan Seigerman, head of healthcare research at BMO, on Thursday said: “Even with pricing cuts, we see the impacts as largely muted relative to net prices we currently model, another positive to the deal structure.”
The duo cut drug prices in return for a large new pool of potential patients in Medicare, he said, which covers more than 67mn older and disabled people.
The deal follows months of wrangling with drug companies, which were reluctant to cave to Trump’s demands to lower prices. The president has repeatedly prioritised lower costs for weight-loss drugs he calls the “fat shot”.
Thursday’s announcement is likely to be seen as a political win for Trump. Nearly 12 per cent of US adults are using weight-loss drugs, the research group Rand said in an August report. About one in five women between 50 and 64 years old are taking these drugs, the report said. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said weight-loss drugs changed his relationship with food. Elon Musk has also applauded them on social media.
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