The ‘bad boy of pharma’ Martin Shkreli shared his opinion of Big Pharma company Pfizer in a recent interview with Vice magazine. He said: “I hate companies that are hypocritical and Pfizer is a good example of a company like that”
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After launching into an expletive diatribe against the Big Pharma giant, Shkreli backed his opinion by highlighting that in: “Pfizer’s clinical world headquarters they don’t have one lab in there, they don’t have any research going on, this company has cut billions of dollars of research and they raise [drug] prices all the time.
“In fact they raised the price of a hundred drugs and nobody wrote anything about it.”
This point may seem like a well-intended highlight by Shkreli of the hike-pricing strategies that big pharma companies use to increase their profit margins, however, the main reason that Shkreli is dubbed ‘the bad boy of pharma’ is due to his own price-hiking tactics.
In 2015 Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, bought the rights to Daraprim, a drug used by pregnant women and people with AIDs. He then hiked the price of that drug by 5000% overnight, resulting in a price-per-tablet explosion from £8.95 ($13.50) to £475 ($750).
Currently, Shkreli is being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for price-gouging and seems to have a few sour grapes when it comes to big pharma companies in the US who have used price-hiking schemes.
However, the not-so-small difference between Shkreli and companies like Pfizer is the percentage amount which they increase drug prices by.
In January, Pfizer confirmed a 9.4% increase for its pain drug Lyrica, a 12.9% increase for erectile dysfunction drug Viagra and a 5% increase for Ibrance, a novel breast cancer drug.
The morality of price-hiking dugs for profit remains a rather controversial subject, yet it is easy to argue that Shkreli’s hypocritical comment may seem a little unbalanced considering between Turing and Pfizer there was an average 4990% difference in immediate price increase.
Also it may be worth mentioning that whilst Pfizer is not being investigated by the FTC, the company’s decision to hike 100 drug prices was highlighted by Reuters, Bloomberg Business and many other media outlets, rather than “nobody” writing anything about it. However, Shkreli still remains ‘the bad boy of pharma.’