Former European Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan and former US Senator Richard Burr, speaking on a panel at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, pushed to see a larger picture beyond the Trump administration’s year of chaos and confusion.
John Stanford opened the proceedings on day one of the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference by asking something of his audience.
“I know some of you want to hide behind the business of what you’re doing. My plea: do something this year. Make advocacy a part of your year.”
Stanford, the executive director of Incubate, a Washington-based coalition of life sciences venture capitalists, hosted Phil Hogan, former European Commissioner for Trade, and Richard Burr, former Senator from North Carolina, in a JPM26 kickoff event Monday focused on biopharma policy following a year of chaos and uncertainty triggered by changes enacted by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Turning to Burr, Stanford posed his first question: What do you make of 2025 for the biotech community?
Burr, now a policy advisor at law firm DLA Piper, leaned back casually in his chair, stretched his camo-patterned slip-on Toms and interred that little of what has happened over the last year was unexpected.
“We said a year ago that this was going to be a very challenging administration. We thought the focus would be on reducing the size of the federal government and reshaping the responsibilities of federal agencies. I think we’ve seen exactly that.”
That said, he continued, “there have been surprises.” Burr specifically referenced last week’s news that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had instructed the CDC to remove recommendations for several childhood vaccines. “It disrupts the market in a lot of different ways,” Burr said. But, he added, “we said this administration would be disruptive.”
Burr encouraged the audience of investors, consultants and executives to look for the silver lining in the upending of the FDA and the pressure applied to multinationals by the Trump administration in the form of Most Favored Nation drug pricing schemes.
“In chaos there is opportunity. Are you going to focus on the chaos, or spend the time focusing on the opportunity? I think that’s why it’s so important that there’s an event like this [JPM].”
The MFN Distraction
Stanford turned to Hogan, seated next to him, and asked about Trump’s favorite pharmaceutical lever, Most Favored Nation (MFN) drug pricing. “How did MFN get heard on the other side of the ocean?” Stanford asked.
First off, Hogan said, Trump’s interest in MFN drug pricing made EU member states wonder if perhaps Trump would consider rejoining the World Trade Organization, which Trump cut off U.S. funding to in one of his earliest moves after returning to office, in March 2025.
Beyond that, Hogan said that placing MFN restrictions on the broader EU will be extremely difficult, since the EU is not just one country but a coalition of nations with their own economies and interests.
“The EU is 27 member states,” Hogan said. “Each has their own possibilities for reimbursements. MFN is a distraction; reimbursements are a distraction.” A likely scenario, he suggested, will be that individual EU members will want to forge their own deals with Trump.
Stanford, speaking with BioSpace after the panel, concurred, saying that even the U.S. could likely be interested in individual deals. “[The U.S.] can get a better deal in one-on-one situations. In that situation, the U.S. is always the 800-pound gorilla.”
Stanford added that Trump could extract concessions from Europe by putting any U.S. involvement in Europe up for negotiation, up to and including supplying Ukraine in its ongoing war against Russia’s invasion. “This is the moment that tests the EU’s ability to hang together.”
“I think this administration is deft at identifying possible levers via tariffs and other trade agenda items, all the way up to military agenda items,” Stanford continued. “Ukraine looms over Europe, and one of the things that the Trump administration has taught us all to do is not put anything in a silo. I think the administration will see the full toolkit—any U.S. dollars, intelligence, resources, efforts. Our blood, our sweat, our tears, our treasure. If Europe needs to be pulled to the table, they’ll put it on the table.”
“And I don’t know how Venezuela fits into this,” he added.
The European Perspective
Compared with Burr, Hogan was more measured, if not downbeat, about the Trump administration’s impact.
“The first thing the Europeans didn’t understand was that Trump could be reelected,” he said. Now, the European market and the EU is dealing with a fundamentally new way that the biopharma sector ties the U.S. and the EU together, he said, and it’s something like a political football used to extract political gains from one another.
“We’re in a position where biotech is not a part of the geopolitical community, it’s a part of the trade negotiation,” Hogan said. In July 2025, the EU signed an agreement with the Trump administration to levy a 15% tax on all pharmaceutical imports, a deal that analysts at the time said would burden the industry with billions in extra costs.
And since that agreement was not a true trade agreement—which would need to be approved by Congress—but one negotiated directly with the Trump administration, it is inherently political and, therefore, subject to the whims of whoever is in charge in the U.S., Hogan said.
“For my European counterparts, there’s concern that a political agreement can be changed at a moment’s notice.”
