Shuen Chun-wa, 81, and her husband rushed to a green bus along with 20 other Hong Kong residents, dragging empty suitcases. They had purple tour stickers on their jackets and were heading shopping in Shenzhen, a bustling Chinese city north of the border with Hong Kong.

It was Ms. Shuen's second trip to Shenzhen to find bargains in a year. The last time she got dental implants. “You can count how much I have to pay,” she said. She paid $9,000 in Shenzhen for a procedure that would have cost $25,000 in Hong Kong. 'I don't have the money. So I went to Shenzen.”

Since China opened its borders in January 2023 after several years of pandemic isolation, Hong Kong residents have made Shenzhen a weekend destination for shopping, dining and, yes, even the dentist.

Fed up with high costs, poor service and limited choice at home, Hong Kongers are heading to Shenzhen to shop for groceries, eat out and discover new bubble tea shops. Hong Kong remains one of the most unaffordable cities in the world, and its battered economy and plummeting stock market have made everyone more money-conscious. In China, a stagnant economy has led to a steady decline in prices, which have fallen the most since the 2009 global financial crisis and are bordering on a phenomenon known as deflation.

The retail migration is a reversal of the days when mainland Chinese flocked to Hong Kong to buy everything from luxury bags to baby food. For Hong Kongers, the slowdown in China offers a rare price drop. All it takes is a short bus or metro ride across the border to the mainland.

On social media and chat groups, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers are talking about new food offerings in Shenzhen, such as pastries filled with seaweed and pork floss. They share tips on where to find bubble tea, including a place where the tea is brewed by a robot. Tour operators that once focused on package holidays to Japan and Thailand are now also organizing buses to shopping centers in Shenzhen to visit stores such as Sam's Club.

Some weekends there are so many Hong Kongers in Shenzhen's malls that locals joke that the visitors are 'occupying' them.

Their presence in Shenzhen, a city of 17 million inhabitants, is visible everywhere. Some stores are adapting their advertisements by using Cantonese, Hong Kong's local Chinese language, to attract tourists to their stores. Restaurants offer discounts to customers with phone numbers that include Hong Kong area code 852. In a large shopping center near a border crossing, opticians and dental clinics promise a cheaper service than Hong Kong, requiring only a short journey. “Cross the border to check your teeth without any distance,” enticed a giant neon pink ad.

On a busy day, the GoodFeel Dentist clinic could see more than 100 customers from Hong Kong, said Lan Xinghua, a sales director at GoodFeel Dentist. He said the company's turnover doubled when the border with Hong Kong opened last year. To generate even more sales, the clinic set up a stall near the border crossing at Luohu Port. Employees are expected to speak both Cantonese and Mandarin, the official language of China.

“Hong Kong customers spend more money and generally don't bargain too much,” Mr Lan said. Sometimes entire families come to have their teeth cleaned and repaired.

The two cities are separated by a border that distinguishes mainland China from Hong Kong, a Chinese territory that long operated with a degree of autonomy but has increasingly come under Beijing's rule.

Many Hong Kongers who traveled to the mainland for shopping had not been there since 2019. Then pro-democracy protests swept Hong Kong and the government responded with a crackdown, eradicating the political tolerance that had distinguished Hong Kong from mainland China.

Now people in Hong Kong, using online forums that are censored or inaccessible on the mainland, are discussing whether it is safe and politically acceptable for people who disagree with the Chinese government to visit Shenzhen, even just to shop and to dine.

For many, the answer is 'yes'.

“Life and political opinion can be separated,” said Chak Yeung, 31, a Hong Kong resident who works in the technology industry. He has been involved in student organizations participating in protests in the past, but he doesn't see any conflict between his political views and what he does for fun on the weekends.

Hong Kong has a separate currency from that of China, and its merchants still rely heavily on cash for payments. The main form of payment in China is digital: the two main payment apps, WeChat and Alipay, have only recently become available to Hong Kongers and not everyone is familiar with them. To help visiting shoppers, posters in Shenzhen's stores and subway stations explain how Hong Kong residents can use WeChat and Alipay. Tourists can also pay in Hong Kong dollars and not convert their money into Chinese renminbi.

But paying is not always smooth. On her most recent trip, Ms. Shuen used cash to buy dandelions that her son uses in his Chinese medicine practice in Hong Kong, as well as some dried shrimp. But she said paying in cash was difficult.

Exploring Shenzhen can also be difficult. Two women from Hong Kong had to ask a Shenzhen resident, Kristen Lu, 28, how to use local navigation apps on their phones. They didn't realize that Google Maps doesn't work in mainland China because the company is blocked.

Mr. Yeung, the technical assistant, has visited Shenzhen twice in the past year. He enjoys eating hot pot and playing archery and basketball in a sports and entertainment complex. He said the workers he encounters in Shenzhen are more pleasant.

The service in Hong Kong is grimmer and more hasty, he said.

For Iris Yiu, 29, a student pursuing a master's degree in Hong Kong, going to Shenzhen is all about food. She said she is a fan of spicy food, a staple in parts of southern China, and in November she and two friends went to Shenzhen and ordered “crazy” from a famous Sichuan food chain called Taier Sauerkraut Fish. They weren't ready yet. Next they stopped at Bobo Chicken, a restaurant that serves vegetables and meat in small bites on sticks that cost 14 cents each.

Ms Yiu said local customers stared at them as they grabbed as many sticks as they could. Someone at a nearby table said, “This is the style of Hong Kong people, as if they don't need money!”

Snow Wong, 28, heard about Shenzhen when her friends and colleagues returned from weekend trips. After so many rave reviews, Ms. Wong decided to try it herself.

She visited arcades and karaoke bars and discovered that the city had more interesting escape room games, her favorite pastime, than Hong Kong. She used Hong Kong dollars to pay for a visit to a spa near the Luohu border crossing.

Above all, Ms. Snow said, Shenzhen offered something that Hong Kong famously lacks: a slower pace.

“The pace of Shenzhen and Hong Kong is so different,” Ms Wong said. “Shenzhen is the place where I go to relax.”

In an unmarked laboratory stationed between the campuses of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a splinter group of scientists is on the hunt for the next billion-dollar drug.

The group, funded with $500 million from some of the wealthiest families in corporate America, has caused a stir in academia by dangling seven-figure paydays to lure highly qualified college professors into a for-profit bounty hunt. Its self-proclaimed goal: to avoid the roadblocks and paperwork that slow down the traditional paths of scientific research at universities and pharmaceutical companies, and to discover dozens of new drugs (primarily against cancer and brain diseases) that can be produced and sold quickly. .

Start-up braggadocio is the norm, and many ex-academics have started biotech companies, hoping to get rich with their one big discovery. This group, rather boastfully named Arena BioWorks, borrows from a quote from Teddy Rooseveltdoesn’t have a single idea, but he does have a big checkbook.

“I make no apologies for being a capitalist, and that team motivation is not a bad thing,” said tech magnate Michael Dell, one of the group’s backers. Others include an heiress to the Subway sandwich fortune and an owner of the Boston Celtics.

The wrinkle is that for decades, many drug discoveries not only originated in colleges and universities but also generated profits that helped fill their coffers. The University of Pennsylvania, for example, has said it has made hundreds of millions of dollars for research into mRNA vaccines used against Covid-19.

Under this model, such a windfall would remain private.

Arena has been operating in stealth mode since early fall, before unrest over Israel and Gaza erupted at the universities it borders. Still, the impetus behind it, say researchers who rushed to the new lab, is only becoming more acute as the reputations of higher education institutions take a hit. They say they are frustrated by the slow pace and administrative problems at their former employers, and by what a new employee, J. Keith Joung, said was “horrendous” pay at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he worked before Arena worked.

“It used to be considered a failure to move from academia to industry,” says Dr. Joung, a pathologist who helped design the gene-editing tool CRISPR. “Now the model has been reversed.”

The motivation behind Arena has scientific, financial and even emotional components. The early backers first pondered the idea at a late 2021 confab at a mansion in Austin, Texas, where Mr. Dell, along with early Facebook investor James W. Breyer and a Celtics owner Stephen Pagliuca, presented their vented to another about the seemingly endless requests for money from collegiate fundraisers.

Mr. Pagliuca had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to his alma maters, Duke University and Harvard, much of it for science. That earned him seats on four advisory boards at the institutions, but it began to dawn on him that he had no concrete idea what all that money had yielded, apart from his name on a few plaques outside various university buildings.

Over the next few months, these early backers worked with a Boston venture capitalist and trained physician, Thomas Cahill, to devise a plan. Dr. Cahill said he would help find frustrated academics willing to give up their hard-won university tenures, as well as scientists from companies like Pfizer, in exchange for a big cut of profits on the drugs they discovered. Arena’s billionaires will keep 30 percent, while the rest will flow to scientists and overhead.

For-profit science is, of course, nothing new; the $1.5 trillion pharmaceutical industry provides ample evidence. Businessmen like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into startups trying to extend human life, and many pharmaceutical companies have raided universities looking for talent.

A significant percentage of medicines come from government or university subsidies, or a combination thereof. From 2010 to 2016, each of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration was connected to research funded by the National Institutes of Health, according to the scientific journal PNAS. A 2019 study from a former dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, said that most of the “new insights” into biology and disease came from academia.

That system has long-standing advantages. Universities, typically helped by their nonprofit status, have a virtually unlimited, low-paid supply of research assistants to help scientists with early-stage research. Groundbreaking drugs have emerged from this model, including penicillin.

The problem, scientists and researchers say, is that approval from university institutions to move forward with promising research can take years. The process, aimed at filtering out unrealistic proposals and protecting security, can involve writing lengthy essays that can take up more than half of some scientists’ time. When funding is secured, the original research idea is often already outdated, triggering a new cycle of grant applications for projects that will certainly be outdated in time.

Stuart Schreiber, a Harvard researcher who quit as Arena’s chief scientist, said his more profound ideas rarely received support. “It got to the point where I realized the only way to get funding was to apply to research something that had already been done,” said Dr. Schreiber.

The cachet of Dr. Schreiber – he is a pioneering chemical biologist in areas such as DNA testing – has helped attract almost 100 researchers to Arena. Harvard declined to comment on his departure and that of others he helped lure.

There is an air of calculated secrecy surrounding Arena’s activities. Dr. Joung, who resigned from Mass General last year, said he had not told former colleagues where he was going, and that several people had asked if he was terminally ill. Dr. Cahill said that several scientists he hired had their university email access quickly disabled and faced stiff legal threats of retaliation if they tried to recruit former colleagues — a common phenomenon in the business world that has come to be seen as brass knuckles applies.

The five billionaires backing Arena include Michael Chambers, a manufacturing titan and the richest man in North Dakota, and Elisabeth DeLuca, the widow of a founder of the Subway chain. They have each invested $100 million and expect to double or triple their investment in later rounds.

In confidential materials provided to investors and others, Arena describes itself as “a privately funded, fully independent, public asset.”

Arena’s donors said in interviews that they had no plans to completely stop their donations to universities. Duke turned down an offer from Mr. Pagliuca, an alumnus and board member, to set up part of the laboratory there. Mr. Dell, a major donor to the University of Texas hospital system in his hometown of Austin, leased space there for a second Arena laboratory.

Dr. Schreiber said it would take years — and billions of dollars in additional funding — for the team to find out whether his model would lead to the production of valuable drugs.

“Is it getting better or worse?” said dr. Schreiber. “I don’t know, but it’s worth a try.”

Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.

Call it a friendship with extremely generous benefits.

French lawmakers will vote on Wednesday on a plan promoted by President Emmanuel Macron’s government that would encourage international sports organizations to move to the country by promising them what critics have called a “tax gift” unavailable to most French companies and citizens.

The plan, offered as an amendment to the state’s 2024 budget, would reward organizations that relocate by exempting them and their employees from a wide range of corporate, property and income taxes — savings that could be worth millions of dollars each year.

Potential beneficiaries include the governing bodies of a wide range of sports, including more than 30 international federations recognized by the International Olympic Committee. But both supporters and opponents of the tax breaks said they were intended to entice one governing body in particular: FIFA.

FIFA, the governing body of world football, has been based in Zurich since 1932. But in recent years, FIFA’s leadership has talked about moving to greener pastures amid frustrations with life in Switzerland, which was not only the site of its growth into a multi-billion-dollar commercial juggernaut, but also its biggest scandal.

France is aware of this dissatisfaction at the highest level and hopes to bring FIFA – which was founded in Paris in 1904 – home.

The French politicians who drafted the tax plan said they hoped it would entice governing bodies by offering them the kind of tax breaks previously available in some European countries outside Switzerland. Under the proposal, organizations that relocate would be exempt from corporate taxes, local property taxes and even levies on part of their income. The executives and employees who come along would be exempt from income tax for at least five years.

“We cannot be blind to the FIFA issue,” said Mathieu Lefèvre, a deputy of Renaissance, the political party founded by Macron, and a signatory of the amendment that Parliament will vote on Wednesday. “FIFA is very important.”

The amendment granting favorable tax status to sports federations, Mr Lefèvre said, is similar to other recent pro-business changes implemented by the French government, including attempts to lure some major banks from London to Paris after Britain voted to to leave the European Union. in 2016. “We want to make France great again,” Mr. Lefèvre said.

Like some other measures criticized for favoring businesses over workers – most notably changes this year to France’s pension system, which raised the country’s retirement age – the push to attract sports federations through tax breaks does not enjoy universal support. The Senate, the upper house of the French parliament, recently voted to remove the text regarding sports federations from the government’s budget document.

“The words of the senators were quite strong, with everyone thinking that it was some kind of scandal, nonsense, that it was something that really didn’t need to happen,” said Jean-Claude Raux, an opposition lawmaker. But in a sign of their commitment to the amendment, lawmakers reworked the measure to ensure its inclusion.

French Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra was grilled by lawmakers during a recent hearing. defended the bill, rejecting claims that it amounted to a “tax gift” to sports federations. Instead, she said, the law would simply place international sports federations within a framework that France’s other international organizations already enjoy.

But unlike these bodies, including UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, FIFA is a behemoth with almost 2,000 staff, global commercial interests and billions in revenue. It was recently estimated that the four-year cycle leading up to the 2026 World Cup in North America, for example, would generate $11 billion in revenue.

French politicians, including Ms Oudéa-Castéra, have been at pains to point out that the tax breaks would be limited to FIFA’s non-commercial activities, the parts of the organization responsible for governing and developing football across the world world. But it is unclear how France wants to make that distinction.

FIFA declined to comment on the proposed changes. But under President Gianni Infantino, efforts to move some key operations out of the glass-and-steel headquarters in Zurich have accelerated in recent months. FIFA has already said it will move most of its legal department to Miami. And it has opened satellite offices in South America, Africa and Asia as part of Mr Infantino’s oft-quoted ambition to make FIFA “truly global”.

Mr Infantino could be one of the most prominent beneficiaries of the proposed income tax exemption: his pre-tax salary and bonus package totaled $3.9 million, according to FIFA’s latest accounts. He also oversaw the opening of another FIFA outpost in Paris, in 2021. The FIFA pied-à-terre in the French capital, in the opulent Hôtel de la Marine, includes an office reserved for Mr Infantino with stunning views some of the city’s most popular sights, including the Eiffel Tower. Currently, the FIFA department responsible for global football development is located here.

Mr Lefèvre, the lawmaker, said attracting FIFA would be a coup for France’s global image. Others were less exuberant about the implications of the association.

Mr Infantino was only elevated to FIFA’s top leadership after a corruption scandal in 2015 led to the downfall of the previous leadership. Since then he has spoken frequently and emphatically about a reformed organization. However, recent decisions have prompted renewed scrutiny into the way FIFA conducts business. A recent change in the organization’s rules will theoretically allow Infantino to remain in power for more than 12 years. Another country sent the hosting rights for the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, surprising some of FIFA’s own member states.

Belkhir Belhaddad, a French lawmaker who opposes the tax change, said FIFA’s activities should be subject to greater scrutiny if the changes are approved.

“These sports organizations are important, they are useful, they have economic, financial and social relevance,” Mr Belhaddad said. “In the world we live in today, we need them. But they need to be regulated. How do we do it? Who will take care of it?”

The proposals for a new tax status specifically for international sports organizations also received a negative assessment from the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, which received a draft version in September. The court issued a negative opinion on the grounds that such a move constituted a “violation of tax equality,” according to news reports in France.

According to former fighters and military bloggers, the Russian armed forces are stepping up efforts to recruit veterans of the paramilitary Wagner Group, as the Kremlin tries to avoid a new round of mobilization and save some of the force’s combat potential in the wake of the mutiny of its leader. and death.

Four former Russian prisoners who fought with Wagner in eastern Ukraine said they had received calls and messages in recent weeks offering new military contracts. recent reports by Russian military bloggers. Three former fighters said they were specifically called upon to join Rosgvardia, Russia’s militarized national guard.

Originally intended as a rearguard force, Rosgvardia has gained prominence since the invasion of Ukraine led by Victor Zolotov, a former bodyguard of President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr Putin has ordered one major mobilization since the start of the invasion, calling on hundreds of thousands of men, but he has opposed another plan of similar scale, partly to avoid fueling public discontent ahead of next year’s presidential election is fueled.

“Wagner officially becomes a unit of Rosgvardia,” it said a recruiting text received last week by a former Wagner fighter and seen by The New York Times. “The entire structure, working method and commanders remain the same.”

The authenticity of the message could not be verified, but it stems from broader attempts by Rosgvardia to present itself as the successor to Wagner, a sprawling pro-Kremlin paramilitary force that at its peak numbered tens of thousands of fighters spread across three continents.

Wagner, who relied heavily on prisoners who came forward in exchange for pardons, played the leading role in the months-long Russian campaign to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. The city’s fall to Russia in May gave the Kremlin its only significant military victory in more than a year of fighting, at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties.

But the personal rivalry between Wagner’s founder, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, and the Russian military high command came to a head soon after, when Mr. Prigozhin rebelled in June and sent several thousand troops on an aborted march on Moscow.

After the mutiny, Mr. Prigozhin led his loyalists into exile to neighboring Belarus, but continued to travel within Russia to manage his affairs there. In August, he and his closest commanders were killed in a plane crash in central Russia, which Western intelligence officials have described as an assassination attempt.

The Kremlin denies involvement and calls the crash an accident.

Mr Zolotov, the former bodyguard and current head of Rosgvardia, is widely seen as one of the main beneficiaries of Mr Prigozhin’s demise. Before the war, Rosgvardia had mainly monitored public events and broken up protests; During the invasion, his forces entered Ukraine to help occupy the conquered territory.

Shortly after Wagner’s mutiny, Mr. Zolotov announced that Rosgvardia would receive heavy weapons — the kind of equipment Wagner had once received when Mr. Prigozhin was in the Kremlin’s favor.

Mr. Putin has long pitted senior officials and businessmen against each other, a system of rivalry that has allowed Mr. Prigozhin’s feud with the military to fester. Some analysts have interpreted the move to strengthen Rosgvardia as a way to strengthen a loyal faction, especially after the Russian army offered no significant resistance to Wagner rebels as they approached the capital in June.

A regional Rosgvardia official, not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed on condition of anonymity that the force recently created a special brigade to receive former prisoners who had fought for Wagner.

Other former Wagner members appear to have joined Rosgvardia’s Achmat tactical unit, based in the southern Russian region of Chechnya.

Russian state television published a video earlier this month he claimed to show a training session of former Wagner members now serving with Akhmat in Ukraine.

“We have saved absolutely everything,” one apparent fighter, wearing both Wagner and Akhmat uniform patches, told RT television. “We are the same as before.”

The claims in the video could not be independently verified, but the fate of a former Wagner fighter points to Achmat’s efforts to recruit former paramilitaries. A former prisoner named Aleksei Velizhantsev, who had previously served with Wagner, died in Ukraine in September after reenlisting at Achmat, according to a former comrade and a social media post made by his mother.

The Russian military, once another of Rosgvardia’s rivals, has also tried to lure Wagner veterans, according to a person close to the country’s Defense Ministry, who discussed internal policies on condition of anonymity.

The independent Russian news channel Important Stories this month published an internal Russian government recruitment document that listed former Wagner members as one of the target groups.

The Ministry of Defense, which oversees the military, has done so claimed it took hundreds of pieces of Wagner’s heavy weaponry with him after the mutiny. And shortly after Mr. Prigozhin’s death, Mr. Putin met with one of Wagner’s top surviving commanders and a deputy defense minister to discuss the creation of new “volunteer units”. within the Russian armed forces.

Oleg Matsnev research contributed.

A 44-year-old member of Generation X, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis could be an unlikely candidate to squeeze his party’s older voters away from Donald J. Trump, a 76-year-old baby boomer.

But he tries anyway.

As Mr. DeSantis nears the official rollout of a 2024 presidential campaign, he is quickly trying to gain a foothold with this large, politically influential group of voters, and does so by appealing to their pockets.

He has mainly focused on his efforts to reduce the cost of prescription drugs in Florida, including pushing the federal government for permission to import cheaper drugs from Canada. This month he signed an invoice which he says will reduce costs by regulating intermediaries in the pharmaceutical industry.

“We think health care is too expensive,” Mr. DeSantis said as he signed the bill into law in Palm Beach County. “Prescription drugs are too expensive.”

“In our healthcare system,” he continued, “you see a lot of bureaucracy, bureaucracy. And people make money off this system that doesn’t really add value to the system.”

While touring the country performing at Republican fundraisers, the governor added a line about the new law to his stupid speech.

The efforts to highlight the cost of drugs come after Mr Trump, who would be Mr DeSantis’ main Republican rival, attacked him for supported plans to restructure Social Security and Medicare – programs sacred to many older Americans. (Mr. Trump himself has expressed similar feelings in the past.)

According to the Pew Research Center, more than 60 percent of Republican and Republican voters are over the age of 50. Older voters also contributed to DeSantis’ landslide re-election victory last year. He won 6 out of 10 votes from the over 65s, according to exit polls.

The issue of prescription drugs, the prices of which have risen in recent years, reflects one of Mr. DeSantis’ advantages in a primary: the ability to promote a long list of laws he signed into law this year.

But talking about drug costs also illustrates the potential messaging challenges Mr. DeSantis could face as a candidate. The governor, who considers himself a policy expert, has at times struggled to make the topic tangible to voters. The cost of drugs is much drier and more complicated than the red meat he’s fed to his grassroots for conservative reasons, such as shutting down diversity programs in public schools, banning gender transition care for minors and to limit the ability of undocumented immigrants to find employment and access social services.

And because he signs so many new bills – including 37 in one day — even some observant Floridians are unaware of his latest effort to lower the cost of drugs with legislation regulating industry intermediaries called pharmacy benefit managers.

Al Salvi, 61, is the kind of voter who seems likely to be aware of the new law. Mr. Salvi, a cancer survivor who volunteers with AARP in Florida, traveled to Tallahassee from South Florida to testify on three bills during this year’s legislative session. In 2019, he popped up with Mr. DeSantis at an event promoting the initiative to import prescription drugs from Canada and other countries. But he had never heard of the law targeting pharmacy fee administrators.

“Is that damn?” Mr. Salvi said in an interview. “Every time I go to the pharmacy, I see a pharmacist. I have never seen a pharmacy benefit manager.”

“The problem with the messages,” he added, “is that people won’t understand because they need to know how the supply chain works.”

Pharmacy benefit managers partnering with drug manufacturers, insurance plans and pharmacies to provide discounted medications to patients. But patient advocates question whether benefit managers are succeeding enough savings for the consumer. All 50 states searched greater supervision of them, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy.

Industry lobbyists dispute that benefits managers are not helping consumers. And they say Florida’s new law, which passed with broad bipartisan support, will not reduce the cost of drugs.

When Mr. DeSantis discusses the matter publicly, he can sometimes seem opaque. He tends to talk briefly about how he believes benefit managers are harming both consumers and community pharmacies before going into detailed explanations of practices he denigrates, using technical terms like “arbitration opportunity” and “vertically integrated entities.” He often refers to pharmacy administrators by the acronym “PPEs”.

The governor’s office says that if voters are not aware of the policy changes, the news media is to blame.

“Could it be that people are missing out on the great things Governor DeSantis is doing because media outlets like The New York Times choose to only amplify those angles and stories that promote their leftist agenda?” Mr. DeSantis’ press secretary, Bryan Griffin, wrote in an email. (Mr Griffin joined the governor’s political operation on Monday.) “We have held a press conference almost every day for the past two weeks to promote the Governor’s record legislative achievements during this session. The problem is not with us.”

Those studying the issue say they believe Mr. DeSantis’ plan could have a real impact on drug prices and transparency, especially when compared to Mr. Trump’s efforts. When Mr. Trump was in the White House, he tried to end rebates for pharmacy benefit administrators, arguing that they drove up drug prices. But in the end he dropped the matter most of his term.

“Trump’s plan was substantial. But in the end, it was more bark than bite,” said Antonio Ciaccia, the CEO of 46brooklyn, an Ohio-based nonprofit focused on drug pricing education and research. “DeSantis’s plan is more bite than bark.”

Under Florida’s new law, a state attorney will handle consumer and pharmacy complaints against the drug brokers. And state regulators will have broad enforcement powers, including the ability to issue hefty fines and even revoke a pharmacy administrator’s right to work in Florida.

The state also has access to contracts of benefit managers, who are involved in almost everything every step of drug pricing. The three largest intermediaries, CVS Caremark, Express Scripts and OptumRx, own it a majority from the market. She are in common ownership with insurance plans and sometimes pharmacies. For example, CVS Health owns it CVS Caremark, as well as the pharmacy chain CVS and the health insurance company Etna.

“The oversight should help shed light on the drug pricing black box,” said Senator Jason Brodeur, an Orlando Republican who sponsored the bill.

President Biden, for his part, does popular with older voters and pushed through its own plans to lower drug prices. But his administration has blocked Florida and other states from bringing in Canadian drugs, leading Mr. DeSantis to sue the Food and Drug Administration last year. Florida passed four years ago the law that allows the importation of Canadian drugs.

“It’s being held back by the Biden administration and the FDA because they say it’s not safe to buy drugs from Canada,” Mr. DeSantis said recently. “They’re just interfering with the pharmaceutical companies.”

Carly Kempler, a spokeswoman for the FDA, said the agency had a duty “to ensure that the proposed imports would not pose an additional risk to public health and safety while significantly reducing the cost of covered products to U.S. consumers.” .”

For now, Mr. DeSantis still appears to be editing his prescription drug posts.

At a stop in rural Wisconsin, he briefly mentioned the Pharmacy Benefit Administrators Act.

“We’ve moved to hold Big Pharma accountable by shining a light and reining in things like pharmacy benefit managers that make you pay more for expensive drugs,” he said.

The audience responded with mild applause, having erupted in cheers moments earlier when Mr. DeSantis described a bill he signed that would allow the death penalty for sexual assault against children.