Manchin Family Values
Fred Gardner
Counterpunch.org, June 10, 2021
Excerpt...
After some superficial improvements (a stronger spring, clearer instructions) that supposedly justified raising prices, Mylan began its big marketing push in 2009. With almost 90% of the market, their key goal was to get every school in the US to keep EpiPens on hand. Children face the highest risk of a fatal response because many never been exposed to the substance they’re allergic to. Adults generally know what they’re allergic to and try to avoid exposure or carry the antidote.
As Governor of West Virginia, Joe Manchin had appointed his wife to the state Board of Education in 2007. By 2012 Gayle Conelly Manchin would be president of the National Association of State Boards of Education, an official-sounding-but-private outfit that lobbies state boards to adopt policies favored by Association members. In 2016 USA Today (a paper that doesn’t get enough credit for serious muckraking) reported that Mrs. Manchin had “spearheaded an unprecedented effort that encouraged states to require schools to purchase medical devices that fight life-threatening allergic reactions.
“The association’s move helped pave the way for Mylan Specialty, maker of EpiPens, to develop a near monopoly in school nurses’ offices. Eleven states drafted laws requiring epinephrine auto-injectors. Nearly every other state recommended schools stock them after what the White House called the ‘EpiPen Law’ in 2013 gave funding preference to those that did.”
Snip...
Heather’s brilliant career was launched after Joe Manchin introduced her to the CEO of Mylan. Although her claim to have a Master’s Degree in Business Administration was exposed as a lie, her fast rise to the top was unimpeded. Heather had something better than a degree, she had real audacity. And so she quadrupled the price of a drug that several million US Americans must have on hand and buy every year. (Somebody ought to confirm that epinephrine degrades significantly in a year. It might be a pseudo-scientific marketing device like Dial Soap’s famous “Rinse and repeat.”)
Heather’s salary rose from $2.5 million in 2007 to $18.9 million in 2015. She was then 45 years old and would have become the poster child of Pharmaceutical Industry Greed had it not been for Martin Shkreli, who raised the price of the anti-parasitic drug Diapram from $13.50 to $750. Then the publicity-welcoming “pharma bro” won the auction for the world’s only copy of a hip-hop album by Wu-Tang Clan. Shkreli was sentenced to seven years and may still be doing time for securities fraud, but presumably, he got to enjoy “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” before the 2-CD rarity was seized by the feds.
Heather is married to a corporate lawyer named Jeffrey Bresch whose firm represents, in addition to numerous Fortune 500 companies, the Pennsylvania Republican Party in its challenge to the validity of votes mailed in on Election Day in 2020. (But that’s another story). Heather retired at age 50 in 2020 after arranging Mylan’s merger with Upjohn. The first woman to head a Fortune 500 Pharmaceutical company, her accomplishments included Mylan’s acquisition of Abbott Laboratories and a transfer of corporate headquarters to the Netherlands, bringing the merged companies’ tax rate down from 24% to 21%. The moral of the story is: you don’t really need an MBA to be a successful corporate executive.
Continues...
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/10/manchin-family-values/
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