Pharma CEO Martin Shkreli tries to donate money to Bernie Sanders in exchange for meeting, gets rejected
Pharmaceutics CEO Martin Shkreli wanted to make a donation to Bernie Sanders’ campaign in order to get a meeting with the Vermont senator, according to Stat.
The Sanders campaign said no thanks.
They’ll be passing on the money to a Washington health clinic, and Shkreli — the so-called “most hated’’ man in America whose company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the price of an AIDS drug from $13.50 to $750 a pill — will not be getting to meet with the Democratic presidential candidate.
In an interview Thursday with Stat, Shkreli said he was “furious’’ Sanders was using him as a punching bag after he made the maximum allowed individual contribution, $2,700, to the candidate’s campaign, so that the two could meet and discuss their differences.
But Shkreli, who tweeted his support for Sanders during Tuesday’s debate, may be looking in the wrong place.
“We are not keeping the money from this poster boy for drug company greed,’’ Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs told Stat, saying the $2,700 will be donated to the Whitman-Walker health clinic in Washington.
Turing acquired the rights to Daraprim, a drug that treats an infection caused by parasites and affects people with compromised immune systems, and subsequently raised the price more than 5,000 percent overnight in September. The move, first reported by The New York Times, sparked a national backlash, of which Sanders was among the most vocal.
Sanders, who has campaigned on lowering prescription drug prices, and Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings sent a letter to Shkreli to investigate Turing and the price increase of Daraprim — to which Shkreli never responded, upsetting Sanders.
“Mr. Shkreli is holding hostage the patients who rely on this lifesaving medication, as well as the hospitals that administer it, by charging unconscionable prices for a drug on which he has a monopoly — just because he can,’’ said Sanders and Cummings in a news release Oct. 12, via Business Insider.
For his part, Shkreli said he genuinely supports many of Sanders’ policies, but he said he wants to talk about the costs of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry Sanders often rails against.
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Shkreli has said he will lower the price of Daraprim, but has yet to do so and told Business Insider it won’t be anywhere near the “critical drug’s’’ original price.
Read Stat’s full report here.
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