 Hey I'm Rita. I'm Mesh. I'm a GP in London. I'm a lung doctor. And we were at the press conference where the redacted US-UK trade documents were revealed by Jeremy Corbyn. Yeah those are the ones that in the national debate were redacted. Jeremy Corbyn held them up and now they've been revealed in their full form. They basically outlined trade talks between the UK and the US over the last two years basically. It's a big thing. Yeah. These trade talks have been completely secret. They've been denied by Boris Johnson and the Tory government and they happened while Boris Johnson was a foreign secretary. Yes so we're going to go through them and outline some of the ways it's going to impact our NHS. So in these documents the US wants full market access as any part of future UK-US trade deals. As a doctor that worries me because I've seen some of the effects of companies bidding for contracts in the NHS. But there was one term the US trade official used, negative listing. I didn't really understand that. Yeah so negative listing is basically where everything is on the table apart from if it's explicitly stated to not be. So in these documents the NHS isn't specifically listed as not being on the table, not being accessible for US companies. So even though it's not explicitly included in the trade documents there's actually a really concerning precedent from trade agreements in the past. An example of this is where in Australia the government was sued by Philip Morris which is a massive tobacco company when the Australian government introduced plane packaging on cigarettes. And that basically was because the government was getting in the way of the legal structure of the trade agreement. So that had been compromised, the government was sued and basically it means that governments can't introduce public health strategies that are going to protect the population because corporations can get in the way. As someone who's thinking as a public health doctor if a new threat to the health of the population gets uncovered it may be harder than ever to actually act to protect the health of people in the future. So the US has proposed that patent law should be negotiated as part of any trade deal and patents if you need a bit of a reminder are basically the way that pharmaceutical companies are encouraged to make drugs. So they get exclusive access to selling a medication for a certain period of time after they've made it and that encourages the drug companies to make the drugs because they get a return on their investment. For me the fact they're negotiating these patent laws with a Trump government in the US means that they're trying to extend these laws. That's not explicitly said in the documents but based on the political motivations of both the Boris regime, the May regime and Trump administration it's not exactly going to be fighting for reducing those patents. That means the NHS is going to spend more on drugs. Not only that but in these documents there's arguments against the UK government having the ability to negotiate for drug prices. Now at the moment there's this organisation called NICE, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence and they decide what drugs the NHS is going to buy from pharmaceutical companies. They have a bulk purchasing power where they can negotiate prices and these trade deals are going to threaten that power. I'm going to just bring up one example which is particularly shocking. There's a drug called Humira which is used for inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis. It costs £1,400 in the UK and the same drug costs almost £9,000 in the US. That's because the UK has the ability as a single provider rather than fragmented private providers to negotiate the best deal for its population and of course the pharmaceutical company is going to lower that price if it sees a potential market that it could lose out on. So part of these negotiations relate to food safety and animal health which is indirectly related to human health right? The US describes a worst-case scenario of the UK following current EU regulations. Yeah which is completely absurd to me because when we think about the health of the US population I mean is that something that we're aspiring to? One of the things that was specifically discussed in that documentation was introducing things like chlorine chicken and that is as bad as it sounds. I guess the other thing that they specifically brought up was around our traffic light systems. One of your five a day. So these are really important because as doctors we know how important food is for health. We look at the US and the state of health over there and you know that's not something that we want to be aspiring to and one of the tools that we have in our toolbox is being able to put this messaging on food for example because that puts knowledge and information in the population's hands. So something mentioned in these documents that I wouldn't assume is directly related to health is climate change. Okay and the US representative one of the meetings said that it was a lightning rod issue and this comes from the top. Okay so that means Trump basically. It means Trump yeah. When you're dealing and trade everything's on the table so NHS or anything else. Because I think Trump had pulled out of the Paris Agreement so his track record on the climate is really terrible. I suppose if you've got a polluting car or something that you bought from the US and you're unable to regulate its emissions. Yeah I mean you can't even mention greenhouse gas emissions right. Like that's what the legislation says that you can't put those words in any sort of legal document that we write. So I work in Tower Hamlet and kids have 10% reduced lung capacity. Exactly right. So when we're thinking about this on a population level as doctors I mean we need to be taking action on climate change the way it's going to be impacting people not just like sea level rise and food insecurity but increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters you know all of that stuff we need to just be acting on it and we need to be acting on it quick and we can't do that with this agreement. That's it really. We've tried to touch on the really important aspects of this huge document for health. Yeah so that to me was patent, drug pricing, how international corporations can sue our government, how we're going to be eating chlorine chicken and basically no action on climate change. And the traffic light system. So I'm really worried by this. I have to say this is shocking stuff as a doctor I think all healthcare professionals in fact everyone in the country should be really watching this space and holding these guys to account because I don't want them negotiating the NHS anymore. Rex it was basically sold to us on this premise of taking back control but what these documents show is that we're essentially going to lose control to the US and to Trump. The NHS is actually an example of how we have control. Exactly. To have control of our own healthcare and our own health. So the way that Boris responded to this press conference was basically calling it all nonsense and what I think is nonsense is that we've got 450 pages of hard evidence in front of us and the way that the media respond is by putting up a video of how Boris Johnson likes to eat his scones. Yeah it was the BBC Twitter account and it had a video of him eating a scone. Exactly. I think actually what this shows though is that we just can't trust Boris. He's lied and he's lied again. But there's something worse there as well. The BBC and other media organisations haven't held him to account. They've not asked him the questions. They've not revealed to the public that he has clearly lied multiple times. So we've tried to summarize the key points from this document. Yeah just a little bit really. Yeah it's huge. I'm not sure we can fully comprehend the impact this is going to have. I mean if you want to read all 451 pages you can find them on Reddit. Yeah. And I guess sort of what this shows us is the Labour Party has always said that we can't trust the Tories without NHS and I think these documents prove it. I think there might be some truth in that. The traffic light system. Do you know what that is? I don't know. Give me a sec.