Zach Carter:

Some background for folks who are
shocked by this (outstanding) NYT story on Trump making brutal economic
threats against countries that encourage breastfeeding. The U.S. has a *terrible* record on public health and international trade, going back to the Bill Clinton presidency.

A stated goal of U.S. trade policy under Obama was to *raise* global
drug prices to pad profits for U.S. pharmaceutical companies. He wasn’t confused about it. Human rights orgs, public health officials
and Doctors Without Borders fought Obama on this policy for his entire
presidency.

Higher drug prices = less treatment for poor people in poor countries.
Obama tried to get this stuff encoded into trade law through
intellectual property standards in TPP. But he also dispatched John
Kerry to India to try to get them to squash generics.

More generics = lower prices on brand-name drugs.

The biggest issue for the Obama administration and U.S. pharmaceutical
firms was cancer drugs. New treatments were being developed that could
extend lives for years – and if this stuff could be priced at 5- or
6-figures a year per patient, it would mean enormous profits.

What they did NOT want to see was what happened with AIDS and HIV drugs in the late 1990s.

Clinton was trying to keep HIV drug prices elevated in Africa, and a
consistent talking point in favor of this policy was the idea that the
drugs just chemically could not be produced at low prices.

It wasn’t true. And when activists convinced an Indian generic firm to
produce them at a retail price of $1/day, the Clinton administration
freaked out.

So did LGBTQ activists. They protested at Al Gore’s 2000 presidential
campaign rollout. It was a debacle for Gore, and Clinton quickly carved
out an exception to his global drug price policy for African nations.

This exception saved millions of lives. But it didn’t apply to trade
agreements with the rest of the world, which Clinton formalized in WTO
treaties.

And Obama explicitly targeted price hikes in poor countries, or “LDCs” (Least Developed Countries).

This received roughly zero coverage on TV news. But it went on for
years. Activists protested at the White House. Experts raised hell at
the World Health Organization. But Obama never gave it up.

All of which is to say, what Trump is doing on baby formula is awful. But also par for the course.