RFK Jr speaks on weight loss drug prices in Oval Office

Thank you, Mr. President. I want to start by thanking you, Mr. President, for declaring war on chronic disease in this country. This is something no American president has ever done. If we want to solve the chronic disease crisis, we have to tackle it. Obesity. Obesity is the number one driver of chronic disease. 50 percent of our adult population are obese or overweight, and it drives about 50 percent of health care costs in this country. Diabetes, cardiac diseases, we are going to see a decline because of this historic agreement. We're going to see a decline in costs, but also, more importantly, in the afflictions themselves. This is a—President Trump is the friend of the forgotten American. Obesity is a disease of poverty, overwhelmingly, and these drugs have only been available for people who have wealth. At one point, the majority of prescriptions, the highest concentration of prescriptions in this country was the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And what about the people who live in rural areas, who live in food deserts? What about the people in urban areas who live in food deserts and are suffering from obesity and are locked into that system where they can only get ultra-processed foods, which are aggravating the problem? This will be a lifesaver to them. It's not a panacea. It's not a silver bullet. President Trump has also instructed us to address and end the root causes of chronic disease, and we're doing that. We're about to release dietary guidelines that are going to change the food culture in this country. They're going to change the kind of food the military gets. They're going to change the kind of food that our children get. We're releasing those in December. The Presidential Council for Physical Fitness is going to get more Americans into, particularly our children, into physical activity so that we can attack the root causes of this. But in the meantime, there's nothing more important than we can do than lower this price. As I said, it is the number one cost of all drugs. This is the biggest drug in our country. That's why this is the most important of all the MFN announcements we've made. This is going to have the biggest impact on the American people. All Americans, even those who are not on Medicaid and Medicare, are going to be able to get the same price for their drugs, for their GLP drugs. This happened because of the vision of David Ricks, of Mike Deustar, and the other people on our team who figured out a way to align the interests of the shareholders of their company with the health of the American public. It is a momentous accomplishment. It took months and months of negotiations. I had a wonderful conversation with Mike Deustar about his experience. He thanked me with a caliber of people who are on our side of the negotiating team. Chris Klomp walked away from a billion-dollar business in order to join this administration. David Brooks and, of course, Dr. Oz and Marty McGarry made this happen. They saw that this could be a win-win situation. This was not a zero-sum game. The Biden administration tried to solve this problem unsuccessfully, throwing $40 billion at it. They were able to achieve an agreement that will actually create savings for the American public. We're making all of this available at a savings. That's because the price of diabetes prescriptions is also going to drop. The savings that we get from that are now going to make it available to people who do not have diabetes. People who have a BMI of 27 and above or are pre-diabetic or have heart disease risk, they will be able to get it, but everybody will be able to get this drug. It's going to change. We will lose the American public because of this agreement. We'll lose 125 million pounds by this time next year. It is going to have dramatic effects on human health in this country. I want to thank President Trump for his leadership. He said that I've gotten a lot done as HHS secretary. Almost none of that is due to my ability. It's because I'm surrounded by people who are smarter than me, who are more able than me. Those people came into the administration because they were inspired by President Trump. People like Chris Klump are here because they see this. Do you think they are smarter than you and more able? Believe me, they're a lot smarter than I am. I want to thank you, Mr. President, because you've made me a success here by allowing me to attract these extraordinary people. I want to again thank David Ricks, who we've been talking, we've been in this office again and again. You keep saying he's the smartest guy in industry, that he could talk a dog off a meat truck. He came to the table and Mike starts to hold me. He said, I convinced people for 20 years that it was okay for Europe to pay $10 and for America to pay $140. That's why they make 45, 50 million a year. He did. Finally, I said, I'm at it, right? You did. He did. But anybody could do that, they're entitled, but now it's down to what it should be. Mike told me what a pleasure it was to negotiate with people who were smart, who had common sense, who were able to put themselves in his position and hammer out this deal that is good for everybody. It's great for the American public. I want to close again by just saying that this is a tool in the toolkit. It is not a silver bullet. It is an arrow in our quiver. It will allow a lot of people who are locked into high risk obesity to finally lose weight, to reset and then start doing the kind of things that will address the root causes of obesity. So I want to thank these extraordinary CEOs for sticking with us on this, for allowing us to make this happen. Mike DeWitt said to me, he said, we've known we've had to do this for many years. We just haven't been able to get over the edge and that this, President Trump's order, his executive order, was a catalyst to do something that we always knew needed to be done. So again, thank you for your vision, for your commitment, and thank you to all the CEOs and all of my team are making this historic agreement happen. As I said, Bobby changes. I don't think he's changed. I'm not going to change until the science changes and the science does not look like it's changing. It's getting stronger and stronger every day. What we recommend is that mothers, pregnant mothers talk to their physicians that the mothers of small kids talk to their physicians and we've advised the physicians to reduce the thresholds and to reduce the amount of Tylenol that they give to children as much as possible and only use it when it's absolutely critical.