Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli Banned For Life From Drug Industry in Monopoly Case, Ordered To Pay $64.6 Million (cnbc.com) 67
fahrbot-bot writes: A federal judge on Friday ordered notorious "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli banned for life from the pharmaceutical industry and also ordered him to pay $64.6 million in profits he earned from hiking the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim by more than 5,000% overnight. The ruling in U.S. District Court in Manhattan came in response to a lawsuit alleging illegal and monopolistic behavior connected with Daraprim by the incarcerated securities fraudster Shkreli.
The plaintiffs in the case were the Federal Trade Commission, and seven states, including New York and California. Those same plaintiffs last month obtained a $40 million settlement for the same claims from Vyera Pharmaceuticals, the company that Shkreli had founded. "Americans can rest easy because Martin Shkreli is a pharma bro no more," said New York Attorney General Letitia James. Shkreli is serving a seven-year federal prison term for financial crimes unrelated to his controversial price increase of Daraprim, a drug used to treat parasitic infections in pregnant women, babies, HIV patients, and others. Shkreli controversially raised the drug's price from $13.50 per pill to a whopping $750 per pill in 2015.
The plaintiffs in the case were the Federal Trade Commission, and seven states, including New York and California. Those same plaintiffs last month obtained a $40 million settlement for the same claims from Vyera Pharmaceuticals, the company that Shkreli had founded. "Americans can rest easy because Martin Shkreli is a pharma bro no more," said New York Attorney General Letitia James. Shkreli is serving a seven-year federal prison term for financial crimes unrelated to his controversial price increase of Daraprim, a drug used to treat parasitic infections in pregnant women, babies, HIV patients, and others. Shkreli controversially raised the drug's price from $13.50 per pill to a whopping $750 per pill in 2015.
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Meme Bro's
Re:Cool (Score:5, Funny)
Poor Martin, now he's just a placebro.
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Mod parent up +1 Funny please.
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Damn fine post.
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Poor Martin, now he's just a placebro.
LOL! That deserves to be added in 2022. Hope you don't mind if I use it.
https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]
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But who on Earth came up with that ridiculous term "Pharma Bro?" Does this mean we (please) don't have to hear about it any more?
No one. The term is "Bro" to describe a particular kind of individual. When they gather in any place or industry they adopt that name too. Picture any toxic juveniles and the term "bro" just makes sense. Be it Pharma Bros, or Silicon Valley Tech Bros. It's a damn near generic term now.
So he is in jail for raising the price of a drug (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So he is in jail for raising the price of a dru (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm honestly surprised he lost on this one. From what I could tell, what he was doing with Daraprim was skeezy in the extreme, but essentially legal. I actually clicked the article, and it looks like they managed to interpret his behavior as "anticompetitive". Clearly true, but still I'm happily surprised at the outcome.
Re:So he is in jail for raising the price of a dru (Score:5, Informative)
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GP missed the summery even...
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Martin didn't play the game right.
Correct. His mistake was ripping off the wrong people.
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To be specific, his mistake wasn't breaking the law. His mistake was losing money for those people.
After they lost money, the government began looking to see if they could find a law he had broken. This is similar to Madoff, who was flagged multiple times but ignored until he lost money.
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Re:So he is in jail for raising the price of a dru (Score:5, Insightful)
The EpiPen ripoff strikes even closer to home than mere donors. Joe Manchin's daughter is CEO of the company perpetrating that particular ripoff. For anybody who wants to make a party political point, don't bother. Manchin is a Democrat who votes with Republicans on anything important. Like Republicrat Manchin, a huge number of representatives from both parties love money more than their country and enrich themselves, their families and their friends at the expense of the health, financial security and even lives of the Americans they swear an oath to serve.
It's time to start tying some of these bastards to a post in the town square and horsewhipping them.
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It's time to start tying some of these bastards to a post in the town square and horsewhipping them.
You're too merciful.
Re: So he is in jail for raising the price of a dr (Score:2)
Ah, a fellow fan of tar and feathering. As they say everything that's old will once again be new.
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Manchin is also in bed with the coal companies in his state. The rank and file want in on the infrastructure proposal because they think it will bring green jobs to W. Virginia, they figure coal is gone (nat. gas is eating their lunch) and want to move on into an up and coming industry. But they do not mean anything to Manchin, his money comes from the coal companies.
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they think it will bring green jobs to W. Virginia
Perhaps Manchin is being more realistic. Green energy jobs aren't coming to WV.
WV is too cloudy for solar and there are much better places for wind. The population is undereducated and healthcare costs are high because of the high smoking and obesity rates. The road and rail infrastructure sucks.
The best thing we can do for WV is to give the people incentives to move somewhere else.
Past tense. Epipen $113 at CVS or Walgreens (Score:4, Informative)
She *used* to be the CEO of one of the companies. She hasn't been for a couple years now.
The price is also back to what it was before. $113 at CVS or Walgreens.
The company paid a $345 million penalty.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/1... [cnbc.com]
Re:Past tense. Epipen $113 at CVS or Walgreens (Score:4, Interesting)
So she made her killing and bailed. I'm not sure how this changes my point.
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95% of the people who are dying of COVID are unvaccinated. You have a weird definition of "never work".
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She *used* to be the CEO of one of the companies. She hasn't been for a couple years now.
The price is also back to what it was before. $113 at CVS or Walgreens.
The company paid a $345 million penalty.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/1... [cnbc.com]
The cost of an Epipen containing 500 mg of Adrenaline per 1ml in the UK is £40. Why do Americans let this charade continue?
It would be cheaper for Americans to import it from other countries... I mean if you're allowed.
Also, because it's an essential life saving medicine, the over-the-counter cost is the NHS prescription cost (about £9.90) and the rest is subsidised by the NHS. As a tax paying UK resident, I honestly cant think of a better use of my tax than keeping people alive and health
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Like Republicrat Manchin, a huge number of representatives from both parties love money more than their country and enrich themselves, their families and their friends at the expense of the health, financial security and even lives of the Americans they swear an oath to serve.
Could you outline which specific Democrats in Congress, other than Manchin, are enriching themselves at the expense of the health, financial security and even lives of the Americans they swear an oath to serve, and how they're doin
Re:So he is in jail for raising the price of a dru (Score:5, Informative)
Translation: No, I *CAN'T* so I will insult you instead.
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And yet, no names. That WOULD be the easiest and strongest way to prove your point so I must conclude you either get off on losing or you can't actually come up with a name.
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Feeding a troll is never the best answer.
Never.
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However, I'm confident you're not really interested in the answer and that your request is not an honest one. You're a troll, pure and simple. Even if you weren't, it's obvious you're too lazy or too stupid to take a couple of minutes with Google to get a basic, quick-and-dirty answer yourself. So why would you trust my answer when you don't trust my comment above?
I am interested, which is why I asked you.
"Just Google it" is a lazy answer. You stated that Democrats in Congress are enriching themselve
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Show me one damn politician, Democrat or Republican, that truly gives a rat's ass about any of us "little people". Go on, give me an example. I can pretty much bet that the list will be pretty damn short.
Face it, once you get to Washington... the politics corrupt you, twist you, and otherwise turn you into something that's not human. You lose something when you go there.
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He'll just work for Amazon instead (Score:1)
...and do the same stuff
Why he is being punished ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The true reason everyone came down hard on him was he (inadvertently or unbeknownst to him) drew attention to the level of mark-up and price gouging the Big Pharma engages routinely. Their modus operandi is to make steady, inexorable increases, fly under the radar and not grab headlines. This guy suddenly drew sunlight to that dark corner where these vultures were feasting. Now they have to do more damage control, pause the inexorable increases by a couple of quarters, losing several billions in that process. So they pulled strings and made an example out of this shmuck.
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Normally millionaires don't get punished like this no matter how egregious their crime was.
What a load of crap. Rich and powerful people end up in jail all the time. Yeah, there's a lot less of them in jail, but that's because there's a lot less of them to start out, you knuckle-head. There are a lot more poor people than rich people, so of course more people who go to jail are poor.
Pulling statements out of your ass doesn't make them true.
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Rich and powerful people normally pay a fine and get probation, at best. More often than not they can pay well-connected attorneys to have the charges dismissed or reduced to some misdemeanor.
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Based upon what data? Or, is this just your opinion?
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Forty five years of reading the news. You haven't been paying attention your whole life?
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Yeah, your news isn't data, it's mostly sensationalism. FWIW, I do pay attention, and watch a wide variety. That doesn't mean what you or I have seen are statistically significant.
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https://www.americanactionforu... [americanactionforum.org]
Poverty and excessive legal punishments contribute significantly to the United States’ high rate of imprisonment, which has disproportionately affected low-income and minority populations. . .
Between 1999 and 2016, people convicted of a crime with at least some college education were given sentences that were between 4.6 and 7.8 percent shorter than individuals without college education.
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Forty five years of reading the news. You haven't been paying attention your whole life?
Oh yeah. That's a legit study.. Your reading the news.. As if you read ALL of it from everywhere. Not everyone who is rich is famous. There's lots of people walking around with tens of millions of dollars who are virtually anonymous.
GTFO, try again.
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Rich and powerful people normally pay a fine and get probation, at best. More often than not they can pay well-connected attorneys to have the charges dismissed or reduced to some misdemeanor.
Prove it. I can give you reams of names of rich and powerful people who have done time.
..and the Sacklers run free (Score:5, Interesting)
It's great someone in the pharma industry is getting punished, but the DOJ needs to do more.
Full disclosure: I have a family member who got hooked on Oxy after retiring after 25 years of service from the military and having back surgery, and ended up fatally overdosing. Why are there repercussions for price gauging, but not repercussions for bribing doctors to consider "pain the 5th vital sign" and prescribe addictive narcotics (sold as non addictive!) for moderate pain?
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Full disclosure: I have a family member who got hooked on Oxy after retiring after 25 years of service from the military and having back surgery, and ended up fatally overdosing. Why are there repercussions for price gauging, but not repercussions for bribing doctors to consider "pain the 5th vital sign" and prescribe addictive narcotics (sold as non addictive!) for moderate pain?
There ARE repercussions, they have been in place a couple years now.
It's because of the changes in hospital policy that they no longer give any opiate pain killers after open heart surgery, and no prescriptions of any type for pain once they discharge you from the hospital.
Been through it. This is why I now have a no resuscitation order.
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pharma bro no more (Score:1)
Yeah, now he's hedge fund bro, with lots of pharma in the portfolio, big money in vaccines.
By the way, can anybody remember why he was singled out for doing something rather normal in this business? probably the smirk on his face
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He ripped of some rich people rather than pension funds. If it were your money or mine that went missing nothing would have happened to him.
Fake News (Score:1)
The real question (Score:2)
a drug used to treat parasitic infections in pregnant women, babies, HIV patients, and others.
Does it cure people of covid?
Shkreli is just a fall guy (Score:1)
caps are never right, (Score:2)
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New Unit of Measurement (Score:5, Funny)
Like the Farad, the Shkreli is far too large a unit for normal everyday use, so the milli-Shkreli is most commonly employed. Martin Shkreli himself is the reference ("Le Grand Dick"), measuring at 1000 milli-Shkrelis (obviously). Most people rarely hit above 300 milli-Shkrelis. By comparison, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Gilead) usually measures around 600-700 milli-Shkrelis. And back in 2019, Nick Sandman (famously pictured here [nyt.com] on the left) managed to weigh in around 1150.
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I have to nominate lying Ted Cruz as the record holder. And he is working hard every day to go higher.
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And back in 2019, Nick Sandman (famously pictured here [nyt.com] on the left) managed to weigh in around 1150.
Ah yes, the kid that ended up being totally innocent. Did you ever watch the whole fucking video or just the parts that CNN showed you?
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This pharmabro... (Score:3)
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Really? Who else helped...with references please.
What about epi pens? (Score:2)
"If you want to live, you gotta pay me lots, even if it kills you!"
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Anyone here remember when Epi Pens went from $25-ish to over $500 one day! "If you want to live, you gotta pay me lots, even if it kills you!"
EVERYONE remembers it. That's the ONLY reason anyone gives a shit about this pile-of-crap human.
Next Stop SillyCon Valley (Score:1)
Zuckerberg could use his no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners approach to enslaving the masses in his new Matrix. Plus, I think the two would just hit it off -- greedy corporate sociopaths of a feather flock together and all that.
Wait, sorry, I meant Meta. It's pronounced Meta. Not Matrix. Silly me.