RFK Jr Defends Trump With 'Bizarre' Math Logic Claiming Percentage Reductions Work Differently For The President

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a Senate Finance Committee hearing on 22 April 2026 that President Donald Trump uses a 'different way' of calculating drug price reductions, a defence that drew immediate ridicule from mathematicians and Democratic senators.

The testimony came as Kennedy faced questioning from Senator Elizabeth Warren over the administration's repeated assertion that its TrumpRx drug pricing programme has slashed prescription costs by as much as 600 per cent. Kennedy's attempt to justify the figure, by suggesting the president calculates percentages through an unconventional method, has since gone viral.

What Kennedy Said at the Senate Finance Committee Hearing

Kennedy appeared before the Senate Finance Committee on 22 April 2026 for a hearing on the Department of Health and Human Services budget request for fiscal year 2027. Warren pressed him on how Trump could claim TrumpRx had cut drug prices by 600 per cent. Kennedy's response was unambiguous: 'President Trump has a different way of calculating. There's two ways of calculating percentages. If you have a £480 ($600) drug and you reduce it to £8 ($10), that's a 600 per cent reduction.'

That claim is mathematically incorrect. The standard formula for percentage reduction is the difference divided by the original price, multiplied by 100. Reducing a £480 ($600) drug to £8 ($10) produces a reduction of approximately 98.3 per cent, not 600. A true 600 per cent reduction applied to a £480 ($600) drug would mean the manufacturer had to pay consumers £2,400 ($3,000) to take the medication. Kennedy did not offer a formula to support the alternative calculation he attributed to Trump; he acknowledged only that Trump's method 'departs from standard calculations.'

Warren was brief in response. She told Kennedy: 'I think that means companies should be paying you to take their drugs.' Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the committee, went further in his opening statement, calling TrumpRx 'a sweetheart deal for Big Pharma' and stating: 'There is no bigger fraud on the planet when it comes to drug costs than Donald Trump.'

Mathematicians and Senators React to the Percentage Defence

The clip of Kennedy's testimony spread rapidly on social media. Kit Yates, a mathematician at the University of Bath, wrote on X: 'We've known for a while that the USA's current regime have been out for science, but I never thought they would try to mess with math! You can't just redefine how you calculate percentages.'

Professor Jeffrey S. Morris, also posting on X, put the figure in plainer terms: 'That is an absurdly ignorant statement from RFK. It is a 98% reduction, or you could say an increase from $10 to $600 would be a 5,000% increase, or a 60-fold reduction. There is no way to come up with 600% anything based on these numbers.'

Later in the same hearing, Senator Bernie Sanders pressed Kennedy on his claim that Americans were 'now paying the lowest costs in the world rather than the highest for prescription drugs.' Sanders called it 'an absurd statement,' adding: 'Nobody in the world believes that.'

NPR reported that Kennedy pushed back against Democratic senators, saying: 'You have a lot more power to negotiate. Why don't you just go do it?'

How Trump's 600 Per Cent Claims Started, and Why Fact-Checkers Have Flagged Them for Months

The '600 per cent' figure did not originate at the April 2026 hearing. In remarks on 10 October 2025, Trump told supporters at a drug pricing event: 'Now drug prices are going to be going down 100 percent, 400 percent, 600 percent, 1,000 percent, in some cases.' That transcript was published by the United States Senate Democratic Leadership.

CNN fact-checked the claim shortly after, noting that a reduction of more than 100 per cent is mathematically impossible under standard arithmetic because it would require drug companies to pay consumers. Mariana Socal, an associate professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University who studies the US pharmaceutical market, told the Associated Press in August 2025: 'I find it really difficult to translate those numbers into some actual estimates that patients would see at the pharmacy counter.'

Despite the repeated fact-checks, Trump continued using the same language through his December 2025 prime-time address and into 2026, telling supporters that drug prices were falling by '300, 400, 500, even 600 percent,' as Newsweek reported. Kennedy's decision to defend the figure before a Senate committee, rather than walk it back, represented the first time a senior administration official publicly endorsed an alternative framework for percentage calculations as official explanation.

When a cabinet secretary has to argue that the president follows different rules of arithmetic to justify a policy claim, the policy itself tends to become the smaller part of the story.