Hedge fund trader Martin Shkreli hits back at critics after raising price of HIV drug by 5,000%

Ever since an HIV/Aids patient advocacy group began raising questions last week about why Turing Pharmaceuticals jacked up the price for a medication from $13.50 per pill to $750 overnight, anger against the company has been boiling over.

The medicine, Daraprim, which has been on the market for 62 years, is the standard of care for a food-borne illness called toxoplasmosis caused by a parasite that can severely affect those with compromised immune systems. Turing purchased the rights to the drug last month and almost immediately raised prices.

Alarmed consumers took to Reddit to call for a boycott of the company's products (with some pointing out that it's hard to boycott a drug if you'll die without it) and calling for new laws to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future.

Judith Aberg, a spokesperson for the HIV Medicine Association, has calculated that even patients with insurance could wind up paying $150 per pill out of pocket. "This is a tremendous increase," she told USA Today.

The New York Times reported that Alberg's group and the Infectious Diseases Society of America wrote in a joint letter to Turing earlier this month complaining that the price increase is "unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population" and "unsustainable for the health care system."

The news even got the attention of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who called the pricing "outrageous" and promised that she had a plan to take on the issue. Clinton is scheduled to unveil a highly anticipated drug pricing proposal today.

The tweet drew strong reaction from Wall Street, sending the Nasdaq biotech index down 4.41 per cent on Monday.

Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, and Representative Elijah E Cummings (D-Md.) drew Turing into an already ongoing congressional investigation into recent drug price increases, sending a letter on Monday asking for information about total gross revenues from sales of Daraprim; prices paid for all sales; the prices in foreign markets; and the identity of company official(s) responsible for setting the price.

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