| I've listened to my fair share of Shkreli videos too. One of the best ones that give his side of the story is his speech at Harvard [1] (it's long, and a bit hard to hear, and you may have to skip over people yelling and such, but ultimately he is trying to present his case for a full hour which he doesn't always do). That said, your description of him doing "no harm" is not correct based on what I know about him. He has fairly strong arguments for what he did for Daraprim. Namely, the drug is priced similarly to similar kinds of drugs, they need the money for research and development of future treatments, if people cannot afford Daraprim the cost will be subsidized or the drug will be given to them, and ultimately access to the drug has increased after his acquisition of it. However, these arguments are built upon the healthcare system of the United States, and when Shkreli's activity exceeds the confines of the US these arguments start to break down. KaloBios Pharmaceuticals (Shkreli's company) also acquired worldwide distribution rights for a drug called benznidazole [2] which treats Chagas [3] which most frequently afflicts people living in South and Central America. While the healthcare system in the US protects the poor from predatory practices like Shkreli's, poor people in Central and South America may not benefit from similar protections. I called in to Shkreli's livestream and asked him if he would make the same commitment he made for Daraprim, that anyone who couldn't afford the drug would be given it for free or for a dollar, and he at first denied that his company even had worldwide distribution rights. When I linked him to the court document [2] that clarifies he did in fact get worldwide distribution rights, he claimed that he hoped what every CEO hoped, which is that everyone would buy his product. I continued to press him on what would happen if poor people in countries that didn't have legal protections needed the drug, would they be able to get access to it, and he called me dense and stupid without ever answering my question. Shkreli strikes me as an interesting and intelligent person. He is definitely more complicated than the media makes him out to be. And yet, there is also an element of amoral heartlessness to him. I think his business practice does cause harm. In the US, it causes harm by straining the healthcare system with higher costs, and outside the US it poses the potential to reduce access to critical drugs. I do think media coverage of Shkreli is typically disingenuous - they focus on Shkreli because he is, to many, an unlikeable jerk doing a bad thing. Instead, they should focus on larger companies who are doing similar bad things on a much greater scale, and causing much greater harm. Ideally, this negative coverage would drive the public to understand the problem and seek legal reform to improve healthcare costs and outcomes. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuRyItQAqno [2] - PDF - https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/kalobios.... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagas_disease Also, I once made a bet with Shkreli about how Google search terms worked. He said if I could prove it with an excel file documenting 100 test cases of my explanation he would tweet out a message I wanted him to send. I produced the excel sheet, showed it to him, walked him through it, then he refused to tweet it. |