Promises made in the age of social media need not be kept, many think, as attention spans tighten while the world awaits its next objet d’indignation — which is another way of saying that no matter how horrible you’ve behaved, it’s not necessarily unreasonable to believe that in two months the world’s forgotten about you and your promise, so there’s no pressing need to keep it.
That’s generally true, so long as your horribleness doesn’t reach the majestic heights of Turing Pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli, who increased the price of an anti-parasitic drug by 5,455 percent and claimed it was “still under-priced” before saying that his “altruistic” motive behind founding Turing was “to create a big drug company.”
So when Shkreli’s company announced on Tuesday that he had decided against rolling the price of Daraprim — a drug used primarily to treat parasitic infections in pregnant women and HIV patients — back from $750 to $13.50 per pill, it wasn’t going to go unnoticed.