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Bernie Sanders rejects $2,700 donation from price-hiking drug company boss

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Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign says Martin Shkreli is a ‘poster boy for greed’ and Turing Pharmaceutical CEO calls the senator a ‘demagogue’

 

 

Rupert Neate in New York

 

Friday 16 October 2015 16.41 BST

 

 

Bernie Sanders has rejected a political donation from Martin Shkreli, the drug company boss who tried to rise the price of an Aids and cancer drug by 5,455%.

 

“We are not keeping the money from this poster boy for drug company greed,” said the Democratic presidential hopeful’s spokesman Michael Briggs.

 

Shkreli’s $2,700 donation – the maximum individual contribution allowed – will be handed over to the Whitman-Walker health clinic in Washington, which specialises in treating HIV/Aids patients in the LGBT community.

 

The Turing Pharmaceutical CEO, who had announced an increase in the price of parasitic infection drug Daraprim to $750 a pill from $13.50 a pill, said he was “furious” that Sanders has publicly rejected his money without discussing his side of the story on drug pricing.

 

Shkreli, 32, who made the donation last month, told the Boston Globe that he had made the donation in order to secure a private meeting with Sanders, a Vermont senator. “I think it’s cheap to use one person’s action as a platform without kind of talking to that person,” Shkreli said. “He’ll take my money, but he won’t engage with me for five minutes to understand this issue better.”

 

He said that if given the chance he would like to ask Sanders if he understood that drug companies sometimes need to charge high prices in order to pay for life-saving pharmaceutical developments.

 

“Is he willing to sort of accept that there is a tradeoff, that to take risks for innovation, companies have to invest lots of money and they need some kind of return for that, and what does he think that should look like?” Shkreli said. “And quite frankly, what I’m worried [about] is that he doesn’t have an answer for that, that he’s appealing to the masses, that he’s just kind of talking out of his rear end so that he gets some votes.”

 

Shkreli, who is chief executive of drug company Turing, made public his donation to Sanders during the Democratic debate earlier this week, when he tweeted: “ Damn @BernieSanders is my boy with that Kosovo reference. Gets my full endorsement. I did donate to him…”

 

During the debate, Sanders, the main rival to Hillarious Clinton for the Democratic nomination, continued his fight against the drug industry saying: “I would lump Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry at the top of my list of people who do not like me.”

 

When Shkreli became aware that Sanders had rejected his donation, he said: “Instead of having an intelligent discussion on healthcare Bernie Sanders would rather hold his hands over his ears and be a demagogue.”

 

Sanders is not the only presidential candidate to have poured scorn of Shkreli. Clinton accused him of price gouging and Republican presidential poll leader Donald Trump reportedly said he looked like a “spoiled brat”.

 

 

 

2992.jpg?w=700&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10
Aids activists carry an image of Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli in a makeshift cat litter pan.
Photograph: Craig Ruttle/AP
 
 
 
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