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Bernie Sanders rejects donation from ‘poster boy for drug company greed’ Martin Shkreli
After bashing him, Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli donated money to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) presidential campaign — only to be rebuffed, Stat reported.
“We are not keeping the money from this poster boy for drug company greed,” said campaign spokesperson Michael Briggs.
Instead, Briggs said, the $2,700 Shkreli donated — the maximum individual donation allowed under electoral guidelines — will be given to the Whitman-Walker health clinic in Washington.
Shkreli, who was hit with widespread criticism last month after he raised the price for the medication Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill, told Stat that he backs some of Sanders’ other policy proposals, but made the donation because he wanted to meet with him privately and “explain” how pharmaceutical companies set their prices. He also said that he would ask the senator what prices he would consider fair.
“I’d ask him, what role does innovation play in health care?” Shkreli said. “Is he willing to sort of accept that there is a tradeoff, that to take risks for innovation, companies have to invest lots of money and they need some kind of return for that, and what does he think that should look like?”
Last week, Shkreli accused Sanders of being “misinformed” and “relying on soundbytes and cheap shots” in his criticism of the pharmaceutical industry.
However, Sanders’ campaign has indicated that the Democratic presidential hopeful will not meet with Shkreli.
Forcing me to conform to your beliefs is an exercise in futility.
You deal with you, because you can't stop me from being me.
Pharma Bro To Bernie Sanders: Don’t Want My Money? ‘I May Support A Republican Now’
Martin Shkreli’s hissy fit: “I’d destroy [Sanders] in any debate about pharmaceuticals.”
Last week Turin Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli wrote Bernie Sanders a $2,700 check, the legal maximum for an individual donor. But, as Maria Bartiromo bluntly pointed out to Shkreli on Friday’s edition of Mornings with Maria:
“He rejected you. He doesn’t want your donation.”
But that’s okay, Shkreli smirks, he never cared about Sanders anyway:
“I think he’s a demagogue. He’ll say anything to get a vote, and for me to be his piñata is unacceptable.”
Apparently, Shkreli also believes that only a delusional sociopath like himself or one of his fellow CEOs or hedge funders can really understand how a price-gouging pharmaceutical company works.
“Ultimately, I think Bernie has a lot of great ideas, but if he wants to talk about pharmaceuticals, he can do that with me. And he’s refusing to do that because I think he’s afraid of the issues. I think I’d destroy him in any debate about pharmaceuticals.”
“Because he doesn’t understand,” Bartiromo interrupts skeptically. To which Shkreli confirms, “I don’t think he understands pharmaceuticals at all.” He then tries to convince us that really he’s not a terrible person. He donates “$5-to-$10 million to charity every year.” And unlike most CEOs he doesn’t draw a single penny in salary, preferring to scrape by on his ill-begotten hoard of billions.
Oh, and guess what? Shkreli offered to donate $50,000 to the same AIDS clinic where Sanders sent his $2,700 check. But the AIDS clinic doesn’t seem to want his tainted money either.
So, Bartiromo asks, “How does it feel to be ostracized?”
Shkreli then launches into a schpiel about how Turing, his price-gouging pharmaceutical company, develops drugs other companies have no interest in because the market isn’t big enough, how Turing needs profits and revenues to fund R&D for other life-saving drugs, and how they care about “every single one” of their patients.
Oh, and when he hikes up his drug prices, Shkreli’s not actually gouging people, he’s gouging the U.S. government and insurance companies…Which makes it perfectly okay, apparently. Jeez, no wonder our insurance premiums keep going up as more and more doctors refuse to accept Medicaid because it doesn’t pay enough.
Shkreli then tells Bartiromo he was going to start a Democratic super PAC. But since Bernie Sanders and his fellow Democrats just don’t get pharmaceuticals or the economy, he’s gonna take his big balls of cash and go home. When Bartiromo asks who he plans to support, Shkreli responds:
“I haven’t made a decision yet. I’d be willing to support a Democrat. In fact, I was going to start a Democratic super PAC with my own money. But after this backlash and the lack of understanding of our economy from what I’ve seen of the Democrats, I may support a Republican now.”
Bernie Sanders does understand how the economy and the pharmaceuticals industry work. He just doesn’t like it.
What Shkreli doesn’t get is that Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have a perfect understanding of how the economy and the pharmaceutical industry work. They just don’t like it. Shkreli sees himself as virtuous because he donates to charities and his company develops life-saving drugs. But Sanders and Clinton believe health care and access to life-saving pharmaceuticals are basic human rights that shouldn’t depend on a company’s profits.
Furthermore, Sanders questions a so-called free market that rewards the Shkrelis of this world with billions of dollars for moving money around, while the people who actually do things that are useful and necessary don’t even make enough to pay their rent.
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Forcing me to conform to your beliefs is an exercise in futility.
You deal with you, because you can't stop me from being me.
Bad news, ‘Pharma Bro': Shkreli’s company loses nearly $15 million after price-gouge debacle
Martin Shkreli’s company lost nearly $15 million during the three months in which he was roundly criticized for attempting to jack up the price of an anti-parasitic drug, Business Insider reported.
Turing Pharmaceuticals posted a loss of $14.6 million during the third quarter of 2015, which ended on Sept. 30. That was a month after the ex-hedge fund manager’s firm acquired the right to sell Daraprim in the US, then announced it would raise the price from from $13.50 to $750 a pill.
Shkreli defended the move at the time by saying, “If there was a company that was selling an Aston Martin at the price of a bicycle, and we buy that company and we ask to charge Toyota prices, I don’t think that that should be a crime.”
But he was soon bashed by not only the public, but presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders — who rejected Shkreli’s donation to his campaign — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
The “self-trained biologist” backed down amid the criticism, announcing on Sept. 22 that he would not go through with the price increase. However, he has not escaped political scrutiny: a congressional committee has called on Shkreli to testify regarding his pricing policies.
Forcing me to conform to your beliefs is an exercise in futility.
You deal with you, because you can't stop me from being me.
Reviled drug CEO Martin Shkreli indicted by feds http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/17/news/co ... index.html He ran his companies "like a Ponzi scheme." The charges he faces represent a "trifecta of lies, deceit, and greed."
That is how federal law enforcement officials described the allegations unveiled Thursday against pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli.
