It’s all painfully ironic for a guy who started a foundation earlier this year under his own name for helping out the underprivileged.
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“This isn’t the greedy drug company trying to gouge patients, it is us trying to stay in business,” Mr. Shkreli told the Times. Turing quickly upped the drug’s price from $13.50 per pill to $750 per pill.
The drug was approved in the year 1953, which is three decades before Shkreli’s birth, to treat toxoplasmosis.
In fairness, it should be noted that Turing is not the only firm ripping off the public by charging outrageous prices for older treatments for rare diseases that are low-cost to produce and have a near “captive audience”. Shkreli justified the move by saying the overall impact will be a minor one as there are only 12,000 or so prescriptions for the specialized drug a year, and because the proceeds will go toward developing a newer treatment with fewer side effects.
For example, Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) and HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA) have both asked the company to reconsider the far higher price, in an open letter to Turing Pharmaceuticals.
In the United States, Daraprim is mainly used to treat toxoplasmosis, a serious life-threatening condition for newborn babies from women who were infected by various parasites, as well as holding a role in cancer or AIDS treatments. Pharmaceutical companies are buying old or neglected drugs, some of them generic, and hiking up the price tag by making them a “specialty drug”, according to the Times.
“Every week, I’m learning about another drug that has increased in price because of a change in marketing or the distributor”, Aberg added. “This cost is unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population in need of this medication and unsustainable for the health care system”. In the fifteen or so hours following the Times article’s publication, Shkreli sent out 125+ tweets to the “haters” calling out his company’s operations. In July 20012, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called for an investigation of Shkreli and others whom it charged were manipulating the prices of drug company stocks through blog posts meant to spread negative and purportedly misleading information about certain drugs.
Shkreli’s price hike on an old drug threatens to become the kind of lightning rod for the controversial pricing issue that the industry will find it hard to defend against in the lead-up to a presidential election.
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Turing has gone out of its way to protect individual patients with a co-pay assistance program.
