27 January 2017 - When Martin Shkreli, then the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, infamously raised the price of the rare disease drug, Daraprim, from $13.50 to $750/pill, big drug companies quickly scrambled to disassociate themselves from the person who was being called the “Most Hated Man in America.” Merck CEO Ken Frazier spoke for others when he said:

"I think it is really important to our industry to make it clear that he is not us. We are a research-based pharmaceutical industry."

Frazier’s point is a good one. Unfortunately, most people lump ALL events about drugs, be they pricing issues, drug safety, illegal drug detailing, etc., into one big bucket. They really don’t know enough about the industry to distinguish among the huge array of biopharmaceutical companies that now exist. When people hear about a pharmaceutical company executive behaving badly, they associate such behaviour with the entire industry–all get tarred with one brush.

Read Forbes magazine article