Last Call For The No-Longer PharmaBro

Cartoon villain Big Pharma executive and federal convict Martin Shkreli received his final comeuppance today as a judge ruled that not only must he repay more than $60 million in profits that his company illegally reaped, but that he's also banned from the pharmaceutical industry for life.

Martin Shkreli must return $64.6 million in profits he and his former company reaped from jacking up the price and monopolizing the market for a lifesaving drug, a federal judge ruled Friday while also barring the provocative, imprisoned ex-CEO from the pharmaceutical industry for the rest of his life.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote’s ruling came several weeks after a seven-day bench trial in December that featured recordings of conversations that Cote said showed Shkreli continuing to exert control over the company, Vyera Pharmaceuticals LLC, from behind bars and discussing ways to thwart generic versions of its lucrative drug, Daraprim.

“Shkreli was no side player in, or a ‘remote, unrelated’ beneficiary of Vyera’s scheme,” Cote wrote in a 135-page opinion. “He was the mastermind of its illegal conduct and the person principally responsible for it throughout the years.”

The Federal Trade Commission and seven states brought the case in 2020 against the man known in the media as “Pharma Bro,” about two years after he was sentenced to prison in an unrelated securities fraud scheme.

“‘Envy, greed, lust, and hate,’ don’t just ‘separate,’ but they obviously motivated Mr. Shkreli and his partner to illegally jack up the price of a life-saving drug as Americans’ lives hung in the balance,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said, peppering the written statement with references to the Wu-Tang Clan, whose one-of-a-kind album Shkreli had to fork over to satisfy court debt.

“But Americans can rest easy because Martin Shkreli is a pharma bro no more.”

Messages seeking comment were left with Shkreli’s lawyers.

Shkreli was CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals — later Vyera — when it raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill after obtaining exclusive rights to the decades-old drug in 2015. It treats a rare parasitic disease that strikes pregnant women, cancer patients and AIDS patients.

Shkreli defended the decision as capitalism at work and said insurance and other programs ensured that people who need Daraprim would ultimately get it.

But the move sparked outrage from the medical community to Congress and was a rare source of bipartisan agreement on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, where Democrat Hillary Clinton called it price-gouging and future President Donald Trump, a Republican, called Shkreli “a spoiled brat.”

Shkreli eventually offered hospitals half off — still amounting to a 2,500% increase. But patients normally take most of the weekslong treatment after returning home, so they and their insurers still faced the $750-a-pill price.

Shkreli resigned as Turing’s CEO in 2015, a day after he was arrested on securities fraud charges related to two failed hedge funds he ran before getting into the pharmaceutical industry. He was convicted of lying to investors and cheating them out of millions and is serving a seven-year sentence at a federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, and is due to be released in November.

 

Don't worry about Martin, I'm sure when he gets out of prison in November that he'll already have a plan to scam tens of millions from Americans, and I can almost guarantee you that the scam will involve the words "blockchain" and "fungible".

Sure is something that even Trump thought this guy was a scumbag, and that's because in Trump's eyes, he was dumb enough to get caught.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

I mean, it was obvious that Russian President Vladimir Putin was cooking up a false flag operation to invade Ukraine, and that the Biden administration and NATO clearly knew this, but it's another thing entirely to just up and tell everybody about the damn plan.

The US has information that indicates Russia has prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation in eastern Ukraine, a US official told CNN on Friday, in an attempt to create a pretext for an invasion. 

The official said the US has evidence that the operatives are trained in urban warfare and in using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia's own proxy forces. 

The allegation echoes a statement released by Ukraine's Ministry of Defense on Friday, which said that Russian special services are preparing provocations against Russian forces in an attempt to frame Ukraine. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan hinted at the intelligence during a briefing with reporters on Thursday. 

"Our intelligence community has developed information, which has now been downgraded, that Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating the pretext for an invasion," Sullivan said on Thursday. "We saw this playbook in 2014. They are preparing this playbook again and we will have, the administration will have, further details on what we see as this potential laying of the pretext to share with the press over the course of the next 24 hours." 

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Friday that "the military units of the aggressor country and its satellites receive orders to prepare for such provocations." 

The US intelligence finding comes after a week's worth of diplomatic meetings between Russian and Western officials over Russia's amassing of tens of thousands of troops along Ukraine's border. But the talks failed to achieve any breakthroughs, as Russia would not commit to de-escalating and American and NATO officials said Moscow's demands -- including that NATO never admit Ukraine into the alliance -- were non-starters. 

The US official said that the Biden administration believes Russia could be preparing for an invasion into Ukraine "that may result in widespread human rights violations and war crimes should diplomacy fail to meet their objectives."

 

Somewhere Putin is screaming at someone saying "You can't just tell people the truth like that, that's not how this works!" 

But hey, popping his balloon before it sets sail seems like a good way to prevent conflict, yes?

 

The Big Lie, Con't

As I've said several times before in The Big Lie series of posts, the entire point of GOP election lies is to weaken Democratic candidate wins and paint them as cheaters, fraudsters, and crooks in order to justify invalidating those wins and giving the offices to Republicans. In Florida a special election this week for the late Rep Alcee Hastings' seat was won overwhelmingly by Democratic candidate Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick. Her Republican challenger, Avowed racist Confederacy fan Jason Mariner, is now refusing to concede his 60-point loss and is demanding an investigation into "election fraud".

It didn't generate much in the way of national attention, but there was a congressional election this week. In Florida's 20th congressional district, voters elected Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick to succeed the late Rep. Alcee Hastings, who died in April 2021.

It was not expected to be a competitive contest — Democrats heavily outnumber Republicans in this South Florida district — and it wasn't. President Joe Biden won Florida's 20th with 77 percent support, and Cherfilus-McCormick won the special election with 79 percent support.

But as the CBS affiliate in Miami reported, the unusual part of this story was the response to the outcome from the representative-elect's Republican rival, who hedged on conceding the race.

Now they called the race, I did not win, so they say, but that does not mean that they lost either, it does not mean that we lost," said Republican Jason Mariner. Several hours before the polls even closed, Mariner filed a lawsuit alleging there is a problem with the ballots in Palm Beach and Broward Counties.

The defeated GOP candidate, who didn't quite reach 20 percent of the vote, added, "[W]e'll also have some stuff coming out that we've recently discovered."

Time will tell what's included amidst the "stuff," and Cherfilus-McCormick will be sworn in whether Mariner concedes or not, but the larger concern is that such responses will become common in Republican politics.

Donald Trump, of course, stands out as the biggest sore loser in American history — he went to breathtaking lengths to overturn the will of his own country's voters — but as regular readers may recall, he wasn't alone.

In the state of Washington, for example, the Republican who badly lost the state's gubernatorial race refused to concede, pushed bogus voter fraud claims, and "attempted to sow doubts about the election results" — despite losing by more than 545,000 votes.

 

Expect more races to be challenged like this.

 

Even worse, expect races like this to be overturned and awarded to the Republican.

 

Even far worse, expect people to simply accept the overturning as needful and just.

 

"Any Democrat win is illegitimate" is the 2022 GOP motto.