Anish Koka and Anthony DiGiorgio sit down with Martin Shkreli — the former hedge fund manager and pharma executive best known for the 2015 Daraprim price increase and his subsequent prison sentence — for a wide-ranging conversation on drug pricing, patent law, and the state of the pharmaceutical industry. Shkreli walks through his path from a teenage hedge fund intern to founding Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals, defends orphan drug economics and the Orphan Drug Act's seven-year exclusivity window, and argues that patent terms haven't kept pace with the realities of modern drug development. The conversation turns to the Chemocentrics/Amgen scandal — in which trial data for a rare vasculitis drug was allegedly unblinded, manipulated, and relocked to manufacture statistical significance — which Shkreli calls one of the worst frauds in the history of medicine. The episode closes with discussion of the Sarepta/DMD approval controversy, the limits of randomized trials in surgery and rare disease, AI's parallels to neuroscience, and the state of media coverage of the FDA.

00:00 Intro and Martin Shkreli's backstory

02:40 Origin story: from hedge fund to founding drug companies

07:58 The Daraprim price increase and Shkreli's pricing philosophy

17:14 What it actually takes to bring a drug to market

35:25 The case for the pharmaceutical industry

38:00 The Orphan Drug Act and patent exclusivity

57:31 The Chemocentrics scandal: manipulated trial data at Amgen

1:22:09 Vinay Prasad, Sarepta, and the DMD approval fights

1:34:35 Neurosurgery, clinical trials, and the limits of RCTs

1:37:30 AI, neural networks, and the future of psychiatric drugs

1:40:40 Cardiovascular disease and LDL lowering

1:42:28 Media coverage of the FDA and closing thoughts

Co-Host Handles

@anish_koka and @drdigiorgio

Show Handles

@drsloungepod

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/44vw8eirsKKnjgNIrdDvrR

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-doctors-lounge/id1832097658

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDoctorsLoungePod

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb — nephrologist, former Associate Dean for Curriculum at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine, and founder of Do No Harm — joins Drs. Koka and DiGiorgio to trace how medical education drifted from clinical science toward social activism. Goldfarb recounts the battles at Penn that led to his 2019 WSJ op-ed, the professional fallout that followed, and why he built Do No Harm into a 54,000-member organization with an active litigation strategy. The conversation covers DEI in admissions, implicit bias training, gender-affirming care in minors, nonprofit hospital tax exemption, and what it actually takes to change entrenched institutions through legislation and the courts.

00:00 Introduction — Dr. Stanley Goldfarb

01:37 The 2019 Wall Street Journal op-ed

12:57 The tweet that ended his relationship with Penn and UpToDate

17:04 What 550 FOIA requests revealed about who's driving DEI in academia

21:01 Is there a case for modernizing the medical curriculum?

27:29 How students gained control of the agenda

32:10 How admissions committees began selecting for activists

36:34 The two missions of Do No Harm

47:18 Nonprofit hospital tax exemption and ideological spending

53:44 The constitutional framework

1:07:19 Do demographic quotas ever make sense?

1:09:31 Closing — how to get involved with Do No Harm

Books

Doing Great Harm (2025) — Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Great-Harm-Infecting-Healthcare_and/dp/B0FD3ZP9WN

Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns (2022) — Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Take+Two+Aspirin+Call+Me+By+My+Pronouns+Goldfarb

Articles & Op-Eds

2019 WSJ op-ed: https://www.wsj.com/articles/take-two-aspirin-and-call-me-by-my-pronouns-11568325291

City Journal archive: https://www.city-journal.org/person/stanley-goldfarb

Do No Harm: https://donoharmmedicine.org

Follow Dr. Goldfarb

X: https://x.com/donoharm?lang=en

Co-Host Handles

@anish_koka and @drdigiorgio

Show Handle

@drsloungepod

Subscribe Links

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/44vw8eirsKKnjgNIrdDvrR

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-doctors-lounge/id1832097658

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDoctorsLoungePod

Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg returns alongside Dr. Venkatesh Murthy, NIH-funded cardiologist at the University of Michigan, to dissect the Senator Ron Johnson congressional memo detailing pediatric deaths following COVID-19 vaccination — deaths the FDA's own pharmacovigilance team flagged internally but never disclosed publicly. The conversation covers the well-documented double standard applied to COVID myocarditis versus vaccine myocarditis, how journal editors killed papers not for scientific flaws but out of fear of social media backlash, why Korea's autopsy data revealed fatal cases that would never have been identified otherwise, the post-marketing commitment failures by Pfizer and Moderna, and what it means that we are still annually approving a vaccine with no randomized controlled trial evidence of clinical benefit in the current immune landscape.

00:00 Introduction: Why Dr. Høeg Is Back and What the Ron Johnson Memo Reveals

02:03 How Vaccine Myocarditis First Surfaced: Israel, the U.S. Military, and Early Warning Signs

05:36 Dr. Murthy on the Biology: Why the mRNA Vaccine Produced Cardiac Inflammation in a Different Population Than Expected

10:36 The Puntmann Paper: Statistical Problems, Confounding, and the Push to Close Schools and Cancel Sports

13:58 The Double Standard in Real Time: Subclinical MRI Findings vs. Kids Presenting With Chest Pain

16:26 Risk-Benefit Mismatch: Vaccine Myocarditis in Young Males vs. Genuine COVID Risk in That Population

21:05 Dr. Høeg's VAERS Analysis: Rates of One in Five Thousand, What the FDA's Own Data Showed, and the Paper That Almost Never Ran

24:03 Dr. Murthy Reveals: He Was a Reviewer for a Journal That Killed This Paper for Political Reasons

28:23 Inconsistency of Vaccine Skeptics: Who Was Questioning the Trials Before Election Day

35:52 Korea's Autopsy Program and Why the U.S. Has No Comparable Surveillance System

40:21 The Chikungunya Vaccine Withdrawal: One Death, One Action — and the Contrast With COVID

42:34 Inside the FDA: The OBPV Memo, the 10 Probable/Possible Deaths in Children, and What Happened Next

53:30 Senator Johnson's Subpoena and Why the Number Dropped from 10 to 7

58:20 Causal Attribution Double Standard: COVID Deaths vs. Vaccine Deaths

1:20:59 Should the COVID Vaccine Still Be Approved? Dr. Høeg on the Absence of Clinical Efficacy Evidence

1:23:31 The CDC-Blocked Study, Healthy Vaccinee Bias, and the Limits of Observational Data

1:28:08 What FDA Approval Actually Means — and What It Should Mean

Co-Host Handles

@anish_koka and @drdigiorgio
Show Handle

@drsloungepod

Subscribe Links

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/44vw8eirsKKnjgNIrdDvrR

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-doctors-lounge/id1832097658

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDoctorsLoungePod