So does the fact that so many people know about and despise Shkreli mean that the jury selection process will select for people who are less informed or don't reflect the values of the general population (Or just people who are willing to lie about their ability to be impartial)? Is there a term for this, or how is this accounted for in the process?
jstanley|8 years ago
Listen to the man speak for 5 minutes, instead of listening to the media's portrayal of him, and you'll learn he's an intelligent guy doing no harm.
Nobody was priced out of being able to get Daraprim. Only 2000 people take it. 70% of it was given away FREE to people who said they couldn't afford it. Insurance companies paid the increased price. Drug prices are a very small percentage of the costs insurance companies pay (most of it going towards doctors' fees IIRC). The extra profit was put into researching improvements on Daraprim, which was a 70 (?) year old drug. The only reason Shkreli's company even acquired the rights to Daraprim is because other companies couldn't make enough money on it to want to keep making it.
maxerickson|8 years ago
By which I mean people that pay insurance premiums and taxes (which fund government provided coverage).
Re your edit, drugs are 10% of US health spending: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/health-expenditures.htm
But if we want to significantly reduce spending overall, we are probably going to have to seize every opportunity, even the modest ones.
Chaebixi|8 years ago
Bullshit. He's an intelligent guy who used his his abilities to blatantly subvert the public good for personal profit. There are a lot of smart, greedy people out there; what made him stand out was that he was his fuck-you attitude and how transparently greedy his actions where. Most assholes are smart enough to put up smokescreens and complicate things to deflect the hate. He wasn't. In some ways that imperfection makes him a good example of the idea that the devil has a silver tongue.
Daraprim is generic and off patent. Shkreli's "innovation" was to find a scenario where he could exploit well-meaning safety regulations to essentially make a generic drug proprietary and price-gouge people (or their insurers). Guess what happens when insurers get price-gouged? They jack up the price of everyone's insurance, meaning fewer people can afford it. That's hardly "doing no harm."
AlexandrB|8 years ago
From what I've seen of him on Twitter he's a complete asshole in addition to being kind of a creep (he's currently banned after repeatedly harassing Lauren Duca). That's enough for me to not like him regardless of his company's price gouging.
> The only reason Shkreli's company even acquired the rights to Daraprim is because other companies couldn't make enough money on it to want to keep making it.
I think you should read the Wikipedia article [1] (and it's may sources). But quotes like this don't lead me to believe that Turing acquired Daraprim to "make it better":
> Presentations from Retrophin, a company formerly headed by Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing, from which Turing acquired the rights to Daraprim, suggest that a closed distribution system could prevent generic competitors from legally obtaining the drugs for the bioequivalence studies required for FDA approval of a generic drug.
> In India, over a dozen pharmaceutical companies manufacture and sell pyrimethamine tablets, and multiple combinations of generic pyrimethamine are available for a price ranging from US$0.04 to US$0.10 each (3–7 rupees).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrimethamine
sremani|8 years ago
labster|8 years ago
Raising prices by orders of magnitude on sufferers of rare diseases is a ticket to Hell in the express lane. Making the world hate you is not smart business. Instead of raising prices, maybe they could cut their massive marketing budget to finance more research.
logfromblammo|8 years ago
Every pharmaceutical company is doing exactly the same thing--overpricing their life-saving drugs--and he did it to such an extreme degree that ordinary people actually noticed it.
The only real reason to hate him is that he disrespected Wu-Tang Clan. (Read to the very end of the article.)
unknown|8 years ago
[deleted]
frgtpsswrdlame|8 years ago
>Insurance companies paid the increased price.
Yes but who pays insurance? Us as individuals.
>Drug prices are a very small percentage of the costs insurance companies pay (most of it going towards doctors' fees IIRC).
Do you have a recent source for this? Thanks.
>The extra profit was put into researching improvements on Daraprim, which was a 70 (?) year old drug.
Shkreli admitted his company sold the same form of pyrimethamine, or Daraprim, that had been on the market for 70 years — although he expressed hope that his company could develop a more potent form of the drug that did not hinder the body’s production of folic acid.
“The mechanism of the drug is folate inhibition,” Anandya reminded the CEO, adding that what Shkreli had proposed might not even be scientifically possible.
“The entire mechanism of the drug is to stop the production of folic acid in the first place and the bulk of its side effects are tied up with that,” Anandya said. “It’s kind of counter-intuitive to say that you are going to solve this problem when it’s not a problem as much as the whole raison d’etre of the drug. This I find is the main problem with your plan. That the solution is not worth $749.”
“One cannot suggest such a (monstrous) increase in the price of a drug which by your own admission does nothing better while telling me your plan is to (because this is the only way it would work) create an entirely new drug not related to pyrimethamine at all because it would require a new structure,” the physician continued. “Which in turn would give you a big hassle since you would require testing and FDA approval from scratch anyway. I think your plan is flawed.”
http://www.alternet.org/economy/pharma-bro-martin-shkreli-ge...
And:
Here’s an excerpt from an email sent Dec. 8, 2015 from McLeod to Nancy Retzlaff, Turing’s chief commercial officer and Eliseo Salinas, Turing’s president of research and development: “I understand I know nothing of what makes Turing solvent and able to do research and of course I value that a lot too.…However, Martin [Shkreli] did say that he had to maximize profit for investors and that was why price is high. He did not say it was for research primarily that it was a high price. He called that the ‘dirty secret’ of pharma.”
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/1bn-here-we-come-martin-shk...
And:
As for Shkreli’s claims that the profits will go to research for a better version of Daraprim, experts aren’t buying it.
"Turing has not got a single clinical trial underway. Shkreli’s not testing new drugs of any kind for toxoplasmosis. He's got nothing registered," Attaran said. "No one needs a new drug for toxoplasmosis anyways. It works so well bloody well."
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/sep/24/...
>The only reason Shkreli's company even acquired the rights to Daraprim is because other companies couldn't make enough money on it to want to keep making it.
Ah yes, the ever charitable Shkreli.
Here’s Shkreli on May 27, 2015 in an email to the chairman of the board of directors after news that Turing was making big progress toward acquiring Daraprim: “Very good. Nice work as usual. $1 bn here we come.”
He sent a couple of emails to company contacts, saying that the drug purchase would be announced, and providing some estimates of how much money the company could make. From one on Aug. 27, 2015 he wrote: “I think it will be huge. We raised the price from $1,700 per bottle to $75,000…So 5,000 paying bottles at the new price is $375,000,000—almost all of it is profit and I think we will get 3 years of that or more. Should be a very handsome investment for all of us. Let’s all cross our fingers that the estimates are accurate.”
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/1bn-here-we-come-martin-shk...
>The only reason Shkreli's company even acquired the rights to Daraprim is because other companies couldn't make enough money on it to want to keep making it.
I'd love to see a source for this as well. As far as I know Impax had no plans to discontinue the drug, do you have anything indicating otherwise?
ImSkeptical|8 years ago
That said, your description of him doing "no harm" is not correct based on what I know about him. He has fairly strong arguments for what he did for Daraprim. Namely, the drug is priced similarly to similar kinds of drugs, they need the money for research and development of future treatments, if people cannot afford Daraprim the cost will be subsidized or the drug will be given to them, and ultimately access to the drug has increased after his acquisition of it. However, these arguments are built upon the healthcare system of the United States, and when Shkreli's activity exceeds the confines of the US these arguments start to break down.
KaloBios Pharmaceuticals (Shkreli's company) also acquired worldwide distribution rights for a drug called benznidazole [2] which treats Chagas [3] which most frequently afflicts people living in South and Central America.
While the healthcare system in the US protects the poor from predatory practices like Shkreli's, poor people in Central and South America may not benefit from similar protections. I called in to Shkreli's livestream and asked him if he would make the same commitment he made for Daraprim, that anyone who couldn't afford the drug would be given it for free or for a dollar, and he at first denied that his company even had worldwide distribution rights. When I linked him to the court document [2] that clarifies he did in fact get worldwide distribution rights, he claimed that he hoped what every CEO hoped, which is that everyone would buy his product. I continued to press him on what would happen if poor people in countries that didn't have legal protections needed the drug, would they be able to get access to it, and he called me dense and stupid without ever answering my question.
Shkreli strikes me as an interesting and intelligent person. He is definitely more complicated than the media makes him out to be. And yet, there is also an element of amoral heartlessness to him. I think his business practice does cause harm. In the US, it causes harm by straining the healthcare system with higher costs, and outside the US it poses the potential to reduce access to critical drugs.
I do think media coverage of Shkreli is typically disingenuous - they focus on Shkreli because he is, to many, an unlikeable jerk doing a bad thing. Instead, they should focus on larger companies who are doing similar bad things on a much greater scale, and causing much greater harm. Ideally, this negative coverage would drive the public to understand the problem and seek legal reform to improve healthcare costs and outcomes.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuRyItQAqno
[2] - PDF - https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/kalobios....
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagas_disease
Also, I once made a bet with Shkreli about how Google search terms worked. He said if I could prove it with an excel file documenting 100 test cases of my explanation he would tweet out a message I wanted him to send. I produced the excel sheet, showed it to him, walked him through it, then he refused to tweet it.
RodericDay|8 years ago
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monochromatic|8 years ago
The truth is almost always subtler.
and0|8 years ago
dmix|8 years ago
The worst case scenario is having someone who has been previously influenced by reading newspapers. Especially in this day and age of outrage culture and highly politicized 'journalism'. I do not want my judicial system being tainted by politics and ideology the way the media has.
will_brown|8 years ago
Otherwise the constitution guarantees a jury of your peers not a jury of people with the same/similar/local values. Certainly in context "peers" could come under scrutiny in light of the dictionary definition.