{"id":181247,"date":"2016-08-20T21:15:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-21T02:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/20\/wait-who-is-calling-the-epipen-manufacturer-vultures\/"},"modified":"2016-08-20T21:15:00","modified_gmt":"2016-08-21T02:15:00","slug":"wait-who-is-calling-the-epipen-manufacturer-vultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/20\/wait-who-is-calling-the-epipen-manufacturer-vultures\/","title":{"rendered":"Wait \u2026\u2026\u2026 Who is Calling the EpiPen Manufacturer Vultures?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The manufacturer of the EpiPen, Mylan pharmaceuticals, has been raising the price of the pens by 15% every 6 months for years.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s gotten so bad that pharmaBro Martin Shrelki has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2016\/08\/19\/martin-shkreli-weighs-in-on-epipen-scandal-calls-drug-makers-vultures.html\">just called  the  company vultures<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">A growing chorus is calling on the <a href=\"http:\/\/data.cnbc.com\/quotes\/MYL\">Mylan<\/a> pharmaceutical company to justify its price hikes on EpiPens, a potentially life-saving medication for children and others facing fatal allergies that has little real competition. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">In 2007, a two-pack of the epinephrine-filled devices went for $56.64 wholesale, according to data gathered by Connecture, a health insurance data specialist. Now it&#8217;s jumped to $365.16, an increase of 544.77 percent. Since the end of 2013, the price has gone up by 15 percent every other quarter. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Doctors, parents, patients, and a former presidential candidate are speaking out on social media \u2014 and negative comments are filling up Mylan&#8217;s Facebook page following an NBCNews.com story Wednesday.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Even Martin Shkreli, the disgraced former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, has weighed in.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;These guys are really vultures. What drives this company&#8217;s moral compass?&#8221; he told NBC News in a phone interview.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">In 2015, Shkreli famously jacked up the price of Turing&#8217;s malaria and HIV medicine Darapim overnight, from $13.50 to $750, a move that earned him a grilling by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in February \u2014 and the nickname &#8220;Pharma Bro&#8221; for his seemingly carefree attitude toward affordable medication. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Our model of pharmaceutical production and research and development is fundamentally broken.<\/p>\n<p>We have expanded IP protections on drugs over the past 40 years, and what we have seen is that drugs have become less affordable, and efforts of the drug companies have moved from cures to finding ways to evergreen those IP protections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The manufacturer of the EpiPen, Mylan pharmaceuticals, has been raising the price of the pens by 15% every 6 months for years. It&#8217;s gotten so bad that pharmaBro Martin Shrelki has just called the company vultures: A growing chorus is calling on the Mylan pharmaceutical company to justify its price hikes on EpiPens, a potentially &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,970,969,1018],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-corruption","category-evil","category-pharma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181247"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}