Sen. Bernie Sanders is promoting his rejection of Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli’s money in a fundraising email to supporters, asking them to join “our fight against corporate greed” by making a small contribution.
The Vermont independent, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, told supporters on Monday that he donated Shkreli’s contribution of $2,700 to an AIDS clinic after Shkreli defended raising the price of a life-saving drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill.
“Sick people be damned,” Sanders wrote of Shkreli’s approach, deriding him for the practice.
The drug Daraprim is used to treat the parasitic disease toxoplasmosis, which particularly affects people with weakened immune systems.
“I don’t need money from people like Martin Shkreli and the billionaire class,” Sanders wrote. “I need you.”
The email asks for contributions of $25.66, the average contribution Sanders’ campaign has received this week.
Sanders has campaigned on the platform that access to health care is a right.
Shkreli last week told Stat, a publication from Boston Globe Media Partners, that he made the contribution on Sept. 28 partly because he supports some of Sanders’ proposals (not about drug prices) but mainly to help get him a private meeting with Sanders to explain drug companies’ pricing systems.
He hasn’t appreciated Sanders’ criticism of him.
“I think it’s cheap to use one person’s action as a platform without kind of talking to that person,” Shkreli said in the Stat interview Thursday. “He’ll take my money, but he won’t engage with me for five minutes to understand this issue better.”
Michael Briggs, Sanders’ spokesman, said Sanders gave Shkreli’s check to Whitman-Walker Health, a D.C. clinic that was a “pioneer in caring for people with HIV/AIDS.”
Sanders thought it was appropriate to redirect the money “to help a clinic that has done so much for the gay community Shkreli is trying to gouge,” Briggs wrote in an email.
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