EpiPen controversy, fueled by social media, brands manufacturer Mylan in worst possible light
Talk about the power of the pen! Social media rebelled against the British pharmaceutical company Mylan this week - producers of the poplular EpiPen – and the company’s poor reaction, particularly under the harsh scrutiny of social media and its strong stance - saw its stock plummet to an all time low.
Epi pen
Following the backlash, the company just announced that the maker of EpiPens will start selling a cheaper, generic version of the emergency allergy shots in an article that appeared in the L.A. Times today. However, the furor over repeated U.S. price hikes continues — and looming competition threatens its near-monopoly.
“More must be done — and more quickly — to make this life-saving drug more affordable,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in a statement Monday. “Mylan may appear to be moving in the right direction, but its announcement raises as many questions as solutions — including why the price is still astronomically high, and whether its action is a preemptive strike against a competing generic.”
EpiPens are self-injecting devices for people who have severe, life-threatening allergies, and they release epinephrine to quickly treat the severe symptoms of allergies.
Within days of announcing that the company was raising its prices to $600 per EpiPen, which is a 500 per cent increase over one decade, a Twitter backlash went from 2k to 90k in a matter of days and involved everyone from former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to celebrities. The social media backlash was not helped by a defensive CEO from Mylan, Heather Bresch, whose interview with CNBC on August 25th led to the highest volume of Tweets.
“Look, no one’s more frustrated than me,” Bresch offered in an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, hoisting blame upon the “system” and suggesting that the “four or five hands” that the product passes through before reaching the customer were the reason that costs had been driven up.
In deriding the American system, Bresch also sought to circumvent blame by honing in on the protections that keep drug prices in check elsewhere in the world, such as the existence of nonprofit insurance collectives in Europe and the ability for them to negotiate over drug prices.
The twitter fire continued however and Mylan stocks plummeted. Further, the NYTimes reported that a generic version of the EpiPen was poised to enter the market from another company. However, the FDA reportedly rejected the less expensive generic less than six months ago, which kept the EpiPen as one of very few options for severe allergy sufferers, incentivizing Mylan to keep prices high.
The most telling moment in Bresch’s poorly thought out PR tour came during a New York Times interview where she spelled out her philosophy behind a company that consumers may have previously viewed as the makers of a life saving product.
“I am running a business. I am a for-profit business. I am not hiding from that,” Bresch said to the Times.
Additionally, according to the Atlantic Monthly, the furor surrounding Mylan is the third memorable fit of public pique over a drug manufacturer’s decision to jack up prices on life-saving drugs in recent years. (The best-known offender, Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, came to Mylan’s defense on Wednesday.)
“The EpiPen story may seem shocking, but it fits a pattern. Prescription drug prices are rising across the board. And for various reasons, many medicines are more expensive in the U.S. than they are elsewhere. (In France, EpiPens are sold by a different company, and they cost about $85 a pair. In the U.S., they can cost as much as $600 for a package of two," wrote Olga Khazan in the Atlantic Monthly.
Calming a Twitter hurricane is no easy feat but in a recent article published in the Crimson Hexagon, author Marina Jeon analyzed how social media might have alleviated the PR crisis.
“Because social can help shed light on why a crisis occurs, and to understand where and when the PR strategy failed for general audiences, Mylan could have called on social data for help here to both identify the main topics of conversations around EpiPen to know how to approach them,” Jeon wrote.
Further, using Tweets or news publications to monitor and measure how each case affected the brand’s overall reputation might have helped Mylan gain more knowledge of its audience and influencers, she states.
“Mylan should have known who to specifically address the issue to, so that in future it can respond to the situation and have its core audience circulate a better viewpoint. In the end, the CEO's blame on our ‘broken’ healthcare system isn’t enough to appease the social outrage, and could actually become more detrimental for the brand.”
Mylan must have felt the same way when they announced Monday that it will begin selling its generic version for $300 for a pair of EpiPens, in doses for adults or children, like the current EpiPens. That will still bring Mylan tens of millions of dollars while helping it retain market share against current and future brand-name and generic competition.