Pharma Suddenly Finds Itself Unpopular
STAT covers the life sciences/Big Pharma/Bio industry. I don’t know how they can be surprised to find out that the life sciences/Big Pharma/Bio industry is being viewed as a bad actor.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Three miles from the sprawling U.S. campus of the pharmaceutical giant Astrazeneca, Kerri Evelyn Harris was campaigning to unseat the man who put it there.
Some 200 people had crammed into folding chairs, stood along walls, and spilled into hallways for a look at the insurgent community organizer mounting a long-shot bid to unseat Sen. Tom Carper, an 18-year-incumbent, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary this Thursday.
Harris’s go-to campaign topics include drug pricing, special interests, the opioid crisis — and what she views as the throughline joining all three: the pharmaceutical industry.
The race, broadly, is emblematic of the Democratic Party’s struggle to become more inclusive — Harris is a queer biracial woman in her 30s, Carper a straight white man in his 70s. But Harris, an Air Force veteran and community organizer, is among a select few candidates engaged in a different fight for the party’s identity: the desire to rid it of pharmaceutical industry influence.
