Why Trump’s Denmark tariff would send the price of drugs like Ozempic through the roof

President-elect Donald Trump has not backed down from insisting that the United States needs to acquire Greenland, a Danish territory, "for national security purposes."

But Greenland Prime Minister Múte Egede maintains that Greenland "is not for sale," and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has said the same thing.

Trump is refusing to rule out the possibility of using military force against Denmark, a longtime U.S. ally and member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And he is threatening to "tariff Denmark at a very high level" if it interferes with his desire to acquire Greenland.

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Economists, including former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, are warning that the 25 percent across-the-board tariffs Trump plans to carry out against Mexico and Canada would be highly inflationary and terrible for U.S. consumers.

Similarly, The Hill's Joseph Choi reports that a tariff against Denmark could make two widely used drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, even more expensive in the United States.

"Danish multinational pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk is the sole owner of semaglutide, the active ingredient in both Ozempic and Wegovy," Choi explains in an article published on January 14. "A month’s supply of Ozempic is close to $1000 without insurance, though manufacturer coupons and patient assistance programs are available."

Anyone who watches MSNBC and CNN frequently has been inundated with ads for Wegovy and Ozempic (whose jingle borrows the melody from the band Pilot's 1975 hit "Magic"). And according to Choi, Novo Nordisk "was estimated to be responsible for half of Denmark's gross domestic product growth in 2024."

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Choi reports, "According to census data available through November, pharmaceutical products accounted for roughly 30 percent of Danish imports coming in through U.S. ports in 2024. Polling from KFF last year found that 1 in 8 U.S. adults said they’ve tried a GLP-1 drug like Ozempic, including nearly half of those with diabetes and a quarter of people with heart disease."

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Read The Hill's full article at this link.