Who is this guy?
A: The student teacher for your granddaughter's high-school English literature class. In his comments on her written papers, he misspelled the words "foreshadow" and "ensure."
B. The guy who just registered in your neighborhood as a level-one sex offender, who now works at the Starbucks four blocks from your house. The fact that he memorized your name the very first time you ordered an iced coffee with skim, and now greets you by name every morning, is exceedingly disconcerting.
C. Martin Shkreli, hedge fund shark and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. After raising the price of the drug Daraprim (used to treat certain infections) from $13.00 to $750.00 per tablet, Shkreli backed away under criticism, then peevishly said his company would no longer be doing critical research into new medications. So there. Immediately afterwards, he grabbed his soccer ball and announced he wasn't playing with the other kids anymore.
He is the face of most of what is wrong with our society.
ReplyDeleteJust another greedy bastard.
ReplyDeleteC--a real jerk
ReplyDeleteYour first sentence said it well! Amen!
ReplyDeleteIn less polite terms I would say he is an asshole.
Indeed to all above. I was a 'consultant' (read 'streetwalker') for some big pharma's some years ago. But I would also add that the little spoiled brat, asshole is a good term, brings up a consideration.
ReplyDeleteFor some decades, big pharma has been the source of the most 'pure' research done in the world, in terms of funding. It worked for them because for every 50 million spent, they'd find a drug as an offshoot that would make them 100 million.
What we don't have, that we need, is a source of national funding for research. We have little stuff, yeah. But we need to be focused on this if we are to be a viable source of science in the future.
Something is very wrong with little pharma these days. Millions, myself among them, woke up last January 1st and found ourself piced out of the prescription market. Diovan, an effective blood pressure regulator I've taken for years, a "name brand" that cost me about $40 a month, went to $150 a month. We've found no suitable generic to date. The generic for Celebrex went to over a hundred dollars a month, more than I used to pay for Celebrex. Long ago I sympathized with the bucks big pharma had to invest in new drugs. No more. It now is an industry of flesh devouring sharks.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, in creating outrage by his clownish exaggeration of pharmaceutical costs, young Shkreli has done the public a cruel favor. Turing stock has gone down and other companies are hopefully cautioned by his subsequent backpedaling.
ReplyDeleteI must agree with my former colleague, Tom Cochrun, above.
ReplyDeleteThe guy is a money-grubbing scumbag.
Ditto to pharma bashing. We could add insurance companies to the mix as well. But kudos to Mercurious for sharing the greatest picture ever of the face of douchebaggery.
ReplyDelete