‘Unacceptable’: Lawmakers react to revelations from ICIJ’s Cancer Calculus investigation
Lawmakers and experts in several countries have called for pharmaceutical companies to be more transparent about drug pricing and tax dealings following revelations from ICIJ’s Cancer Calculus.
The investigation, led by ICIJ and 47 media partners, explores how Merck & Co. — known as MSD outside the United States and Canada — keeps huge revenues flowing while pricing out many patients and governments from its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda.
ICIJ’s investigation revealed that Merck operates with a gross lack of transparency in pricing, even as the cost of Keytruda strains public health systems and counterfeiters reap massive windfalls from duping the expensive drug. The findings have so far elicited widespread reactions from politicians, government agencies, and health and financial accountability experts.
Merck’s tax maneuvers highlighted in the U.S.
The international collaboration found that Merck reduced its U.S. taxes by recording profits in lower-tax jurisdictions. In its 2025 annual report, Merck disclosed it paid around $1.6 billion in U.S. income taxes, compared to $4.5 billion in other countries.
At a U.S. congressional hearing on corporate taxation on Tuesday, Zorka Milin, head of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, confirmed those findings.
“Despite making more than half of its sales at outrageous prices to American customers, Merck paid more taxes to Switzerland than it did to the U.S.,” Milin said at the Democrat-led hearing. “For decades, major American pharma companies have been moving their profits and sometimes also their factories overseas. Their customers are mostly American, their intellectual property is developed here with support of American tax dollars, but somehow their profits are Irish, Swiss, Dutch.”
https://www.icij.org/investigations/cancer-calculus/merck-keytruda-cancer-drug-price/
KEYTRUDA Report: Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug topped $200,000 a year under Trump Apr 17, 2026
Recommended reading OVERVIEW How Merck turned its wonder drug into a blockbuster — and priced out cancer patients worldwide Apr 13, 2026 PARTNER STORIES A ‘burgeoning black market’, inflated dosing and the over-judicialization of health care: reporters around the world tell stories about Keytruda Apr 21, 2026 KEYTRUDA Report: Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug topped $200,000 a year under Trump Apr 17, 2026
Medina (ICIJ)