As he became ‘the most hated man on the Internet’ last year, ‘pharma-bro’ Martin Shkreli repeatedly claimed that by hiking the price of HIV drugs he wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Squeezing health services and patients for every last penny is just how the pharmaceutical industry works. And that’s perhaps the only thing he was right about.
While multinational drug companies have turned themselves into one of the most profitable industries in the world, they have peddled the lie that they’re charging eye-watering prices for their life-saving products because it costs a fortune to research and develop them. What they didn’t tell us is that much of that research is publicly funded in the first place.
