‘Red card’ – campaigners stage stunt calling for Burnham to rip up US-UK pharma deal

Andy Burnham has shown Donald Trump a red card in a striking visual stunt staged by campaigners to protest the US-UK pharma deal.

The stunt took place in Parliament Square on Monday, 13 July. It comes after new research in the British Medical Journal revealed that the US-UK pharma deal would divert £45bn from the NHS’s patient care budget toward higher pharmaceutical costs, and lead to 229,000 excess deaths in England.

We Own It, Global Justice Now and Just Treatment are the groups behind the stunt. They’re calling on future PM Andy Burnham to rip up the deal when he takes office. They’re asking him to:

• Give Parliament a say over any pharma deal.
• Review the US-UK pharma deal to protect the NHS and patients.

Campaigners say that Trump’s effort to suspend Folarin Balogun’s red card at the World Cup is symbolic of corruption. By bringing out the red card on Trump’s pharma deal, Burnham would be signalling his commitment to honesty and fairness in politics, and to getting a fair deal for NHS patients.

Professor Karl Claxton, researcher at the University of York’s Centre for Health Economics, and a co-author of the BMJ research, said:

This ‘deal’ is a catastrophe for all NHS patients and those in need of social care. Now is the time to find the courage to stand up for the NHS and fix the broken pharmaceutical pricing system so all NHS patients can access new drugs at affordable prices.

Professor Andrew Hill, researcher at Liverpool University’s Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and a co-author of the BMJ research, said:

We all remember the tragedy of COVID. We cannot allow this US Trade Deal to cause even more deaths. We must not surrender to Donald Trump’s bullying and intimidation.

The pharma deal stunt also had support from NHS campaign groups Keep Our NHS Public and the 99% Organisation. Green peer Jenny Jones and Labour MP John McDonnell attended.

Nick Dearden, director at Global Justice Now, said:

It’s high time the British public was told the truth about Starmer’s pharma deal with Trump. His government has repeatedly lied about this grubby pact – it lied that the NHS was not on the table, lied about the cost to the NHS and lied about the benefits of the deal.

No wonder it won’t release its own figures to the public. Andy Burnham needs to make a clean break here and stop the implementation of this deal, which threatens to do such irreparable damage to the NHS.

Diarmaid McDonald, executive director of Just Treatment, said:

If corporations require hundreds of thousands of lives to be put at risk to sustain their thirst for ever-greater profits, then maybe, just maybe, that’s a sign of a deeply dysfunctional business model that needs to be overhauled.

That our government has chosen to put these companies’ interests ahead of patients and the NHS through the pharmaceuticals deal with Trump is a national scandal.

It is vital that MPs urgently speak out against it. Andy Burnham must commit to reviewing the deal and looking at alternatives that safeguard our NHS as soon as he has the power to do so.

Johnbosco Nwogbo, outreach lead at public ownership campaign group We Own It, said of the pharma deal:

This disastrous deal would cost more lives than the worst pandemic in living memory. It should be a non-starter. That this government has agreed to it is just one more exhibit as to why they are so unpopular with the British public.

Andy Burnham is in a position to become prime minister because he has not been party to the wrong-headed decisions Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting have been making since the last general election. If he is truly to start on a clean slate with the British public, he must rip up this deal.

He must review the deal and give MPs the power to scrutinise it. Donald Trump put America first and forced FIFA to reverse a red card at the World Cup. Burnham should put our country first and scrap this deadly deal.

Featured image via We Own It