Martin Shkreli, “the most hated man in America” is at it again.
Dubbing him “the most hated man in America,” BBC reports that Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, “has been called a ‘morally bankrupt sociopath,’ a ‘scumbag’ a ‘garbage monster’ and ‘everything that is wrong with capitalism,” adding that “those are some of the tamer comments.”
He has been criticized, jointly, by the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association as well as by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton tweeted about his “outrageous” form of “price-gouging,” while Donald Trump called Shkreli a “disgrace” and his actions “disgusting.”
For those unfamiliar with the story, Shkreli is the hedge fund manager who took the price of Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 back in September of this year. That’s a price hike of 5555.56%. When confronted about it, Shkreli’s attitude was: What do you care? You’re not paying for it. Your insurance company is.
It seems that Shkreli is at it again, this time raising the price of an older drug even more dramatically than with Daraprim.
As The New York Times reported last Friday: “Martin Shkreli is once again provoking alarm with a plan to sharply increase the price of a decades-old drug for a serious infectious disease. This time the drug treats Chagas disease, a parasitic infection that can cause potentially lethal heart problems.”
Last month, Shkreli led an investor group who purchased a majority share in failing California biotechnology company KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, allowing him to license the worldwide rights to a version of benznidazole, a standard treatment in South and Central America where Chagas disease is most common.
The New York Times reports that “Benznidazole has never been approved for sale in the United States but is provided free to patients by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on an experimental basis,” adding that “in Latin America, benznidazole costs $50 to $100 for the typical two-month course of treatment.”
However, according to The New York Times:
Mr. Shkreli said on a conference call with KaloBios investors last week that if the company won F.D.A. approval for benznidazole, it would have exclusive rights to sell it in the United States for at least five years. He said the price would be similar to that of hepatitis C drugs, which cost $60,000 to nearly $100,000 for a course of treatment.
This would be a huge success for Shkreli and his investment groups as according to The News York Times report: “It is estimated that 300,000 people in the United States have Chagas disease, virtually all of them immigrants from Latin America who were infected before they came.”
You must be logged in to post a comment Login