Coronavirus: Bad People, Good People

This idiot bought up all kinds of Lysol disinfectant wipes and tried
to sell them at a wildly inflated prices on Amazon

In every crisis, as I said a few days ago, jerks emerge, and good natured people emerge.

So it is with the coronavirus situation.  Two incidents add clarity to what I mean.

I'll get the bad out of the way first.

Meet Manny Ranga and Violeta Perez, who captured the outrage of Canadians and now the world for their stunt to make money off the coronavirus.

They raided a Costco store in Vancouver, British Columbiaa and bought all the six packs of Lysol disinfecting wipes recently, which normally sell for $20 for each six pack, according to The Star.   They completed loaded the back of their F-150 truck with the wipes.

The Star reported that the wipes fetch four times the price from Costco online, and Ranga said that represented a "big opportunity" for them.

They spent $70,000 on the wipes at Costco and profited more than $100,000 in gouge-priced sales on Amazon.

Amazon finally suspended their account Friday, saying the couple violated their policy on pricing inflation.

Ranga whined to The Star that he objects to the way he has been portrayed in the media. Reaction to the story was jeopardizing their livelihoods, he said. Poor baby.   Ranga and his wife normally work as home developers and business had slowed.

Too bad, bubba. We're all in the same boat.

Ranga's scheme might not have been uncovered if not for The Star reported Douglas Quan, who was reporting on a story about panic buying at Costco. He stumbled upon Ranga and Perez loading their truck and asked questions.

Quan said the couple appeared to have no regrets and seemed actually proud of their venture.

The couple isn't so happy now. They're getting slammed on social media, 'natch.

This is one example.  There are also plenty of examples out there of people price gouging. 

CORONOVIRUS MUSIC

One of the potential songs for your virus quarantine playlist 

Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, have the coronovirus, unfortunately and are on lockdown in Australia.  They're hanging in there, and I have to appreciate Wilson's gallows humor through this.

She went on Twitter and asked for crowdsourcing help to develop a playlist for her Spotify account.  She knew it was a fun way to confront the crisis with humor and lots of people picked up on that suggestion.  

Some of the suggested songs are by Wilson herself

A lot of the song ideas were great, and I'll share them with you, as we'll all need this sort of thing, even if we're not under quarantine.

"All By Myself" by Eric Carmen.
"Dancing With Myself," by Billy Idol
"Rockin' Pneumonia And The Boogie Woogie Flu," By Johnny Rivers
"U Can't Touch This," by MC Hammer
"I Wanna Be Sedated," by The Ramones
"I Will Survive," by Gloria Gaynor
"I Want To Break Free," by Queen
"Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You" by Kelly Clarkson
"Leaving On A Jet Plane" by Peter, Paul and Mary.
"So Far Away," by Carole King
"Come Healing," by Leonard Cohen

Other people suggested:
"Splendid Isolation," by Warren Zevon
"I Think We're Alone Now," by Tiffany
"Stayin' Alive," by the Bee Gees
"Toxic," by Britney Spears
"If I Could Turn Back Time," by Cher
"In The Air Tonight," by Phil Collins

Big Pharma Gouging Gets Even More Infuriating With New Site "Correction."

Mallinkrodt CEO Mark Trudeau. Getting rich off by endangering
infants by price gouging anti-seizure meds. Nice. 

Gizmodo, a news, technology and science website, recently ran an incredibly infuriating article about a company called Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals.

This outfit bought another pharmaceutical company called Questcor in 2014.

Anyway, Gizmodo reported that Questcor and Mallinkrodt increased the price for a drug called Acthar from "just $40 in 2000 to over $40,000 today, despite the fact that Acthar has been o the market since 1952."

Acthar is a medication that helps prevent seizures, especially in infants, so it's kind of an important drug.  Mallinckrodt rakes in about $1 billion annually from the now overpriced Acthar, said Gizmodo, citing a CNN report.

When I read that, I thought that can't be true. That's just a ridiculous price increase that nobody would dare try.

It turned out the article wasn't entirely true. Mallinckrodt sent Gizmodo an email, demanding a retraction to an error in the story. Gizmodo obliged. Here's the mea culpa that Gizmodo ran:

"Correction: This article originally stated that the price of Acthar had gone 'from just $40 in 2000 to over $40,000 today.' A spokesperson for Mallinckrodt emailed to request a correction that Acthar actually costs $38,892 today. Gizmodo regrets the error. We also regret that every last one of these guys isn't in prison yet."

Yep, Mallinckrodt was upset, not that they increased the price of a necessary drug by nearly 100,000 percent within two decades. It's that Gizmodo ever so slightly exaggerated the cost of the drug.

As if bilking people to to the tune of $40,000 is beyond the pale but doing the same for a mere $38,892 is not.  No wonder the Gizmodo correction was so snarky.

Drug companies executives do deserve to rot in jail. The Gizmodo article accurately pointed out this:

"Curiously, there's a drug called Synacthen that's identical to Acthar and sells for just $33 in Canada. So why isn't Synacthen available in the U.S.? Because Mallinckrodt bought the U.S.rights to Synacthen and simply doesn't make it available to American consumers."

Because Mallinckrodt figures infants who are injured or die from seizures because medicines are too expensive are definitely worth the profits.

The Gizmodo article explained the Mallinckridt expects to pay a $15.4 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice because of allegations that Quester bribed doctors and their staff to prescribe the super expensive medication.

Yeah, to you and me, $15.4 million seems like a lot of money to you and me. But remember, Mallinckrodt makes $1 billion a year from Acthar alone. It's comparable to the "pain" I would experience if I got a $5 parking ticket.

If this whole thing was just one isolated incident to piss you off, that would be one thing. But the news has been filled with news of Big Pharma boosting prices to sky high levels for fun and especially profit.

It doesn't matter that these new sky high prices are literally killing people. You've heard the stories. Insulin prices have soared, for example. Type 1 diabetics were paying an average of $5,705 in 2016, almost twice as much as just four years earlier. Insulin prices have spiraled in the three years since.

According to USA Today, the Senate Finance Committe told insulin makers to detail their price increases. One vial of Eli Lilly's Humalog went from $35 in 2001 to $234 in 2015. Between 2013 and this year, Nordisk's insulin went from $289 to $540.

The price got so high that diabetics started to ration their insulin. That killed many of them.  These deaths are worth if for the millions these pharma executives are raking in, apparently.  I guess they found a way to literally get away with murder.

The Pharma industry has guaranteed their profits through blocking competition, herculean efforts to confuse patients so they don't understand how much drugs really cost, notes a U.S. News and World Report.

All in the name of profits. We've gotten so dystopian that we just accept this as normal, when people should be marching in front of these evil Big Pharma companies with pitchforks and torches.

I hope there's a special place in hell for these pharma and insurance executives who think it's OK to literally kill people so they can suck up even more millions of dollars.

As Expected, Creepy "Pharma Bro" Keeps Drug Price Way Up To Get Super Rich

Martin Shkreli, stil looking smug for making oodles
of money through drug price gouging, says his many critics. 

I know, I know, I've written on and off about Martin Shkreli, the odious money grubbing "Pharma Bro." You might be sick of him, and I kind of am, too. But he just keeps at it.

I just can't resist staring down a villain, is all.

As you might recall, Shkreli and his company Turing Pharmaceuticals, abruptly raised the price of a life saving drug more than fifty fold, raising it to $750 per pill.

The drug helps peope with HIV, organ transplant patients and others with weakened immune systems.  He didn't really care that he was making the life saving drug financially out of reach for many. So what if some people died? Shkreli needs to get richer.

After a major public outcry, Shkreli said he would reduce the price of the drug. But now, not surprisingly we learn that once the media spotlight was off him, he basically said, forget it. I need to get even more super rich off this drug.

At first glance, it looks Shkreli did do something about the price, but not really.

According to the Associated Press, his company will reduce what it charges to hospital for the drug, and most patients' copayments will be capped at around $10 a month.

Sounds terrific, right? No. As the Associated Press put it, "But insurers will be stuck with the bulk of the $750 tab. That drives up future treatment and insurance costs for everyone.

Another drug company, Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, came out with a similar version of the drug that costs just 99 cents a pill, so at least the people that need the medication can get someting at least similar to the original medication.

Still, Impremis has to work to get insurance companies to sign on to using the cheaper pill, but they're making progress. Impremis is also trying to get Congress to change rules to let Medicare, the Defense Department and other federal agencies to cover the less expensive compounded medicines fro outfits like Impremis, says the Associated Press.

Of course, I have no idea why it should be so hard for Congress to change those rules, but then again, we are talking about the U.S. Congress.

 If your insurance doesn't cover the cheaper drug, you're outta luck. You go bankrupt, maybe, on Turing's uber expensive drug Daraprim.

Meanwhile, Turing, under Shkreli's "leadership" is basically trying to say that the sky high price of their drug is a good thing because lower prices don't benefit patients, reports Tech Dirt.

 Yeah, I don't get that either, but here's what Turing's press release says: "Drug pricing is one of the ost complex parts of the health are industry. A drug's list price is not the primary factor in determining patient affordability and access. A reduction in Daraprim's list price would not translate into a benefit for patients."

Um, right. The press release doesn't exactly explain how lower prices would not benefit patients.

The scary thing about all this is that there's very likely other drug manufacturers who are price gouging drugs because they can.    

Yes, I get it that a somewhat higher price needs to be built into medication to fund innovation in future drugs, but it seems as if a lot of this income is going to make billionaires trillionaires or something, rather than advance the cause of science.

The lobbyists have ensured such a thing is legal, and who cares if it's unethical?

The billiionaires have gotta be billionaires, you know.