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U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Former Pharma CEO’s Appeal Against Seven-Year Prison Sentence

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NEWS

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied Martin Shkreli’s appeal request over his 2017 fraud conviction, effectively upholding his seven-year prison sentence.

COMMENT

Martin Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy in 2017 for defrauding investors out of more than $10 million. The following year he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Shkreli had previously become infamous in pharmaceutical industry circles when in 2015 he raised the price of Daraprim (Pyrimethamine), an anti-parasitic drug that is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines, from $13.50 to $750 per tablet. Marketed since the 1950s, the drug was acquired in 2015 by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up company run by Shkreli. Astonishingly, with even the pro-pharma mass media aghast at his blatant greed, Shkreli shamelessly attempted to portray the 5000 percent price rise as “altruistic”.

Shkreli’s story reminds us that, for the robber barons behind the pharmaceutical ‘business with disease’, it is profits, not the interests of patients, that are the highest priority. Over the next seven years, he will doubtless have plenty of time to reflect on the immoral nature of this philosophy.

Read article at cnn.com
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