Valeant Slammed, Shkreli Calls Congress ‘Imbeciles’ in Tweet
Members of Congress strongly criticized Valeant Pharmaceuticals International ( VRX ) and Turing Pharmaceuticals, accusing the companies of dramatically increasing the price of drugs. The hearing in Washington was heated and at times a puzzling spectacle, with controversial pharma executive Martin Shkreli smirking throughout but refusing to testify after invoking the Fifth Amendment, his lawyer being asked at one point to stay seated, and Shkreli later taking to Twitter to insult lawmakers. With Shkreli declining to comment at the hearing itself, lawmakers used the opportunity to lambaste Turing, Shkreli’s former company, and Valeant about their drug price increases. “They bought them, jacked up the prices, took as much money as they could out of the pockets of patients, hospitals, and others, and then put those funds into their own coffers,” said Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. At one point, Shkreli cracked a smile midway through Cummings’s remarks about how the company’s price increases hurt patients. “It’s not funny, Mr. Shkreli, people are dying,” Cummings said at the packed hearing room in Washington. Shkreli is facing federal fraud charges unrelated to Turing. He has maintained his innocence. Turing and Valeant have become the poster companies for an industry that has been increasingly in the spotlight in Washington for raising some prices so high that they’re out of reach for many patients and straining state and federal budgets. Shkreli was excused after his testimony. Brafman, speaking outside the hearing room, said that Shkreli would have liked to talk. “This was a frustrating morning for us,” Brafman said, “frustrating because many of the things said in this hearing were just not accurate.” He said that some of Shkreli’s demeanor at the hearing was “nervous energy,” and that it was unfair that Turing had been singled out. The “priority is to resolve the criminal case,” Brafman said. “I think at the end of this story he is a hero.” In fact, Shkreli did comment on Twitter, minutes after leaving the hearing. “Hard to accept that these imbeciles represent the people in our government,” he said. Different Than Turing Valeant interim CEO Howard Schiller, in prepared testimony released yesterday, explained why the company decided to increase the prices of two cardiac drugs by 525% and 212%, and promised to end an era of sharp hikes. Valeant’s CEO Mike Pearson is out on medical leave. “While, like most other pharmaceutical companies, we will from time to time raise prices, I expect those price increases to be within industry norms and much more modest than the ones that drew this Committee’s legitimate concern,” Schiller said in his prepared remarks. “Where we’re made mistakes, we’re listening and we’re changing,” he told the committee at the hearing. Schiller was asked how his company was different than Turing. Schiller began to answer, “Valeant is a global company” mentioning the number of offices they have before Representative Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, cut him off, saying they were asking about the company’s strategy, not its scale. “The only strategy I saw was, ‘Let’s increase the price of the drugs,”’ Maloney said. Chaffetz blamed the Food and Drug Administration for not working fast enough to approve generic drugs, saying the agency was “drowning in a backlog” of applications. “I believe that the FDA has failed to meet its statutory responsibilities,” Chaffetz said. “If somebody increases the price of a prescription drug that’s going to invite more competition but if that competition can’t get approval from the FDA there will be no competition.” Janet Woodcock, an FDA official, said the agency was working quickly through the list of applications and that the backlog wasn’t as bad as Chaffetz made it seem. “The generic backlog was a big problem,” she said. “This was ultimately fixed” but takes time to implement.