SAN FRANCISCO — Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks on Tuesday said he believed the company could find “significant common cause” with the incoming Trump administration, even if there were reasons for concern about some of its policy positions.
“RFK ran on his platform [of] making America healthy again,” Ricks said, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom President-elect Trump intends to nominate as his health secretary. “I take him at his word here. I think we have a really significant common cause. I mean, we’ve got 45,000 employees. That’s what we want.”
Ricks, speaking here during a live taping of STAT’s biotech podcast, “The Readout LOUD,” also defended his recent decision to travel to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to meet with the president-elect and RFK Jr. He said he didn’t make a similar trip to meet with President Biden before he took office, in part because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but also because Biden’s people “were tough to get access to for all industries.”
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