President Donald Trump last week threatened triple-digit tariffs on pharmaceutical imports starting Wednesday. The White House now says it may not need to impose them.

According to a White House official, the Trump administration has paused its plan to enact the duties as it attempts to negotiate agreements with pharmaceutical giants to avoid higher tariffs on their name-brand products — like the deal it announced with Pfizer Tuesday.

The official pointed to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s remarks during the Pfizer announcement in the Oval Office. In response to a question about when the pharmaceutical tariffs would go into effect, Lutnick said the administration is “going to let [the talks] play out and finish these negotiations, because they are the most important thing to the American people.”

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“So we are standing by and helping and working with them,” Lutnick added.

Under the multi-pronged deal Trump unveiled with Pfizer Tuesday, the New York-based pharma giant agreed to invest $70 billion to boost its pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity in the U.S. and to participate in a direct purchasing platform called “TrumpRx.gov,” where it will offer a discount on a “large majority” of its primary care treatments and “some select specialty brands.”

In exchange, Pfizer will get a three-year pause on the forthcoming pharmaceutical tariffs.

The president indicated Tuesday that he sees the deal as a model for other drug companies, saying he expected similar announcements over the next week. But he threatened to impose tariffs on pharma companies that don’t come to the table.

“What we’d do is put a tariff on them of an equivalent amount and we take it that way and nobody wants to play that game,” Trump said. “So they’re all going to be good.”

Trump threatened in a Truth Social post last Thursday to impose a tariff of up to 100 percent on “any branded or patented Pharmaceutical Product,” starting Oct. 1. He also said he would raise tariff rates on heavy trucks and kitchen cabinets, effective the same day.

On Monday night, the White House released a proclamation declaring that a 10 percent tariff on softwood timber and lumber and a 25 percent tariff on wooden furniture and kitchen cabinetry and vanities will go into effect in two weeks — on Oct. 14. But the president has not yet signed executive orders formalizing the tariffs on heavy trucks and pharmaceuticals.

“It was an opening salvo that, personally, I think, failed the target by a country mile, just because it’s so over the top,” Simon Schropp, a Brussels-based director at BRG, a global consulting firm, said of Trump’s pharmaceutical tariff threat. “But it is a playbook of outrageous demands and then settle for a headline grabbing deal and then the rest kind of fizzles out. It wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve seen that.”

Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on pharmaceutical products for months, after launching a trade investigation into the national security impacts of importing drugs and active pharmaceutical ingredients on April 1. The Commerce Department has not said whether that investigation, which could give Trump legal justification to impose new duties, has been completed. Under the law, the agency has 270 days to complete the review.

That threat of higher duties has been a major factor in trade negotiations with the United Kingdom and the European Union, home to countries like Ireland and Germany with large pharmaceutical manufacturing industries.