Zanny Minton-Beddoes

And certainly the impact of having tariffs on imported drugs plus the end of subsidies for health care is a double whammy for the U.S.

patients.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

You raise a very important point, which is and this this sounds abstract, but it's actually really important.

For most of the world for the last 80 years in the post-war era, we had a system of global rules for trade, which was based on something called MFN, most favored nation status.

And what that meant was it was essentially a rule that said when a country imposed a tariff, it had to impose the same tariff on all countries.

So you couldn't have one tariff on France and another tariff on Europe.

India.

If you imposed a 5% tariff on a good coming into your country, you'd impose it on everybody.

And what the United States has done under the Trump administration essentially has completely thrown away that system and said, we're not playing by those rules any longer.

We are going to have different tariffs for different countries.

And indeed, we reserve the right to change those tariffs all the time.

And we're going to threaten

change them.

And remember that President Trump has used tariffs not just to negotiate trade deals, but to impose punishments on countries for all kinds of things.

Tariffs were imposed on Brazil in August because President Trump didn't like the way that the current government was prosecuting former President Bolsonaro.

And he made very clear that was one of the reasons that very high tariffs were imposed on Brazil.

So if you're using tariffs to punish countries for all manner of things and you change your mind about tariffs a lot, you have, as you say, an incredibly uncertain system.

And you have an uncertain system that has different tariff rates for all manner of countries.