The power of social media and a generalized outrage against the high cost of medicine combined to bring down the stock prize of a pharmaceutical company Friday after U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders' Twitter account condemned a recent hike of a cancer drug.
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“Drug corporations' greed is unbelievable. Ariad has raised the price of a leukemia drug to almost $199,000 a year,” wrote a Sanders staffer on his official Twitter account Friday afternoon.
The message was retweeted over 1,800 times.
Afterward, Ariad Pharmaceuticals' stock price subsequently tanked 15 percent, approximately US$387 million, according to Bloomberg News.
According to the outlet, this represented the biggest intraday decline in more than a year for the company. The stock ultimately closed the day down 14.8 percent.
The Hill confirmed the drug referenced in the tweet indeed had been increased four times this year alone. A 30-day supply of the Iclusig leukemia drugs costs US$16,000.
The company claimed in a statement that the pricing of the drug was a reflection of their “significant investment in (research and development)” and that they had spent 143 percent of their total revenue on research and development for treatments of rare cancers.
That response is likely to be unpalatable to the U.S. public, which has grown increasingly weary of the high costs of medication.
A Sanders staffer later responded to the incident.
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“The drug industry is getting very, very nervous. We are going to take them on and lower the cost of medication across this country,” read the senator's account.
Sanders famously rejected a campaign donation from the head of Turing Pharmaceuticals firm, because he increased the price of a drug for HIV and cancer patients by almost 5,000 percent.
The donation came to Sanders' campaign in form of an individual contribution from Martin Shkreli, head of Turing.
Shkreli came to be nearly universally reviled for his social media antics. The controversy surrounding Shkreli served to highlight to issue of high drug costs in the United States.