It hasn’t been a good week for Mylan Pharmaceuticals. A flood of bad press bolstered by public outrage has put Mylan in the same public opinion camp Turing Pharmaceuticals was in last year, the jump in the cost of EpiPen being liked to the inflation of Daraprim. The press has been so bad for Mylan over the last several days that their stocks have taken a substantial hit and their investors are, rightly, panicked.
Stocks for Mylan Pharmaceuticals have declined exponentially as panicked investors have abandoned ship. On August 19, before Mylan’s Pharma Bro-esque approach to EpiPen flooded the national news, stocks for Mylan Pharmaceuticals were valued at $49.20 per share. On August 24, stocks were valued at $43.11 per share, hemorrhaging nearly $3 billion in less than a week.
U.S. Senators are looking to investigate Mylan’s business practices.
Mylan Pharmaceuticals CEO Heather Bresch is also mixed up in this debacle. As the cost of EpiPen inflated, so too did her paychecks. Proxy filings show that from 2007 to 2015, her total compensation increased from $2,453,456 to $18,931,068, an increase of 671 percent. Meanwhile, the cost of EpiPen was increased by five percent in both 2008 and 2009, hiked another 19 percent at the end of 2009, increased by 10 percent each year from 2010 to 2013, then raised an additional 15 percent every quarter from the fourth quarter of 2013 to the second quarter of 2016.
Those are super villain price hikes.
Bresch is the daughter of U.S. Senator Joseph Manchin, D-W.Va., and was retroactively given an MBA from West Virginia University, despite not having enough credits, while her father was governor and the university’s president was a former lobbyist for her drug company and a high school classmate.
In business, image is important and when image gets kicked in the face Mylan Pharmaceuticals has this week, the effect of public perception is put on full display. Like Turing in 2015, Mylan’s CEO Heather Bresch has become a mustache-twirling antagonist tying public health to the tracks as a racing locomotive approaches. Incidents like these contribute to the public distrust of pharmaceutical companies, prompting the public to engage in this new form of activism where animosity leads to hellacious effects on a corporation’s bottom line.
We’ve seen it with SeaWorld.
The backlash toward Mylan Pharmaceuticals is, in this writer’s opinion, greatly needed in an age where people go broke saving their lives. The pharmaceutical industry, like any business, is only as altruistic as its bottom line. It’s ridiculous to assume they would be otherwise. But recent incidents perpetuated by Mylan and Turing make it all too clear that the corporate side of medicine does not act in the interest of “do no harm” and only complicates what should be uncomplicated, what should be a human right.
No one should be forced into destitution to save their own lives.
h/t Raw Story