Award season is underway, though that is one record that no one needs to make.
The Lown Institute handed out its 2020 Shkreli Awards, which highlight “the worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in healthcare.”
Hospitals and pharma firms made a formidable exhibiting “for committing acts of greed and indifference within the face of nice struggling,” in response to a Lown Institute information launch. That features Brigham and Girls’s Hospital CEO Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, who got here in at No. 6, for promoting “$8.5 million price of Moderna inventory in 2020, after the corporate’s inventory practically quadrupled this 12 months on information of early success with its COVID-19 vaccine.” She was additionally paid $487,500 in money and inventory awards in 2019 to serve on Moderna’s board of administrators. She resigned from the board in July following reporting on potential conflicts of curiosity within the Boston Globe. Final week, Nabel introduced she would step down from main the hospital.
At No. 7: well being techniques general for punishing front-line staff who spoke out about shortages of PPE and being compelled to reuse single-use masks.
AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson earned the No. 5 spot for opposing a World Well being Group effort for drugmakers to cooperate and share vaccine trial knowledge and patent rights.
However the No. 1 spot was reserved for the federal authorities’s PPE job drive.
“As a substitute of coordinating with states to get lifesaving provides distributed shortly, they handed the PPE over to personal firms, leaving states to compete with one another in an overheated market whereas a nationwide disaster raged,” the institute famous.
The awards, now of their fourth 12 months, are named after Martin Shkreli, the so-called “pharma bro” who, amongst different issues, infamously hiked costs on a comparatively low-cost HIV therapy by 5,000%. He’s at the moment in federal jail for securities fraud.
A panel of clinicians, well being coverage specialists, journalists, and affected person advocates selects the ultimate “winners.” In full disclosure, Trendy Healthcare columnist Merrill Goozner serves as a choose.