You can't have an epipen, by the way. You have to have an epipen for the house, and another for the car, and another for the school, and if you've got daycare you have to have one for the daycare. Or, you know, have your five-year-old carry it around like a cell phone all the time. But don't get it hot. And don't get it cold. And when the color window turns orange, you have to buy a new one. Unless we don't manufacture enough in which case we authorize your doctor to let you keep your orange one because it turns out they don't actually go bad.

They come in two doses, by the way. 0.15mg if you weigh under 50 lbs, 0.3mg if you weigh over 50 lbs. Which is probably why any use of an epipen is a guaranteed ambulance ride to the emergency room. They are blunt instruments left voluntarily unsharpened by the pharmaceutical industry.

In 2007, when Mylan acquired rights to market the drug from Merck (by buying its specialty pharmaceuticals subsidiary Dey), a two-pack cost less than $100, a tiny fraction of what it costs today.

$700 for a two-pack. Your insurance, by the way, will permit you to buy one pack a year. So that extra three the allergist wants you to have (home, school, daycare, mommy's car, daddy's car) are on you. And by the way if they decide they've started production again you need to buy new ones. We don't care if we said the orange ones were fine, they're not anymore.

I know that you were working on a "medical" rationale for Project X2?

I got my class-action notification a couple weeks ago. $345m. 3.6m epipen prescriptions a year. I was able to dig up seven we had to buy. That doesn't include the half-dozen we've gotten as part of an allergy study. Stupid things are so common around here I keep my tools in the cases. Riffler files, scalpels, hobby knives, you name it. They're like little Pelican cases for pencils.

Manchin last week urged Democrats to take a “strategic pause” in consideration of the party’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, the centerpiece of the Biden agenda. A key component of the bill would lower drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies.

BITFD