THE MYLAN MESS
She’s bumbled and botched her way through the Mylan EpiPen fiasco in an epic fail of public relations, writes PR professional
Scandal-ridden CEO Heather Bresch should fire herself, writes a PR pro.
It’s pretty hard to top Wells Fargo, mass manufacturer of fictitious credit-card accounts, as winner of the award for “worst corporate public relations of the month,” but Mylan, maker of the infamous epinephrine autoinjector EpiPen, has managed to do it.
While Wells Fargo’s hapless CEO John Stumpf bumbled his way through another brow-beating by another holier-than-thou congressional committee, Mylan CEO Heather Bresch remained sequestered in her Cecil bunker as her company’s value disintegrates. (Full disclosure: I’m a Mylan shareholder, and I’m mad!)
Mylan, of course, is under fire for jacking up the cost of lifesaving EpiPens from $100 for a two-pack in 2009 to $608 today.
To its credit, after enduring furious public pushback, the company quickly backpedaled, moving to subsidize branded EpiPen insurance payments for both commercially insured and uninsured patients, and announcing that it soon would introduce a less-expensive but identical generic product.
Such decisive public relations actions to mollify critics and mitigate the crisis should have sufficed to calm the Mylan waters. But then, Ms. Bresch took the stage and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Her testimony before the House Oversight Committee was an unmitigated disaster. Rather than arriving with the confidence that her company had learned a lesson and righted a wrong, Ms. Bresch — the daughter of U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — showed up like a scared rabbit, caught in the cross hairs.
She tied herself up in knots attempting to justify the company’s profits on the EpiPen.
She failed to produce the revenue information Congress had requested.
She insisted the company had saved U.S. taxpayers billions in medical expenses, but couldn’t explain how.
Her only defense of her $18 million compensation was that it was “in the middle” of her industry peer group.
And she kept referring to unwieldy and incomprehensible charts she had brought with her to the hearing.
The coup de grace came when Ms. Bresch admitted she had flown by private jet to her congressional engagement. (Not even Wells Fargo’s sputtering Mr. Stumpf made that mistake!)
Predictably, when the rabid congressional attack dogs encountered Ms. Bresch’s unpreparedness, they pounced for the kill, and the CEO staggered from the hearing room.
Which actually would have been OK had not Mylan announced, three days after testifying, that EpiPen profits were really 60 percent higher than Ms. Bresch had reported to Congress. The cause of the error: Applying faulty U.S. tax rates.
In Japan, when a company messes up or deceives its investors or cheats its customers, the individuals who run the company immediately resign in disgrace.
Likewise at Mylan, as its stock descends in free fall, there appears only one action the company must take to restore its credibility: Heather Bresch must fire herself.