EPR Editorial Team5 min read
Part of EPR's Pharma coverage — see also the Pharma Citation Share Study and Healthcare PR & Communications.
Part of the Everything-PR Pharma Pillar · Pharma Crisis & Pricing cluster: Can Big Pharma's Reputation Be Turned Back? · Wu-Tang, Shkreli & Daraprim · How Hims, Ro & Telehealth Built the New Drug Marketing
Updated June 6, 2026. Originally published 2016.
The Mylan EpiPen pricing crisis of 2016 became one of the defining pharmaceutical industry crisis communications case studies of the decade. The price of the EpiPen two-pack — a life-saving epinephrine auto-injector used to treat severe allergic reactions — had risen from approximately $100 in 2009 to more than $600 by 2016, an increase of roughly 500 percent over seven years. The pricing trajectory produced sustained public attention, congressional scrutiny, regulatory action, and meaningful brand damage to Mylan and its CEO Heather Bresch.
This page is EPR's reference on the EpiPen pricing crisis as a pharmaceutical PR case study.
2007. Mylan acquired the EpiPen brand from Merck KGaA, paying approximately $6.7 billion for the broader generic drug portfolio that included the EpiPen franchise. EpiPen at the time retailed for roughly $100 per two-pack.
2009-2016. Mylan progressively increased EpiPen pricing across approximately 17 separate price increases during the seven-year period. By summer 2016, the EpiPen two-pack carried a retail price exceeding $600.
August 2016. Public attention to the pricing trajectory accelerated rapidly. Parents of children with severe allergies — for whom EpiPen availability is a life-safety question — surfaced the pricing increases through social media. Major press coverage followed. Congressional attention developed quickly.
September 2016. Heather Bresch, Mylan's CEO, appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box for an interview that became one of the more-studied crisis communications moments of the period. The interview operated through a series of defensive postures — blaming the broader healthcare system, blaming insurance companies, blaming Congress, claiming Canadian market subsidies as a contributing factor — without producing the accountability framing that the situation required.
September 21, 2016. Bresch testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The testimony produced sustained congressional and press attention to the pricing structure, Mylan's profit margins on EpiPen, the broader pharmaceutical industry pricing practices, and the specific question of CEO compensation (Bresch's reported total compensation across 2007-2015 was approximately $98 million during the period when EpiPen pricing increased substantially).
October 2016. Mylan announced a generic version of the EpiPen at half the brand price ($300 versus $600). The pricing concession was widely received as insufficient given the cumulative price trajectory.
2017. Mylan reached a $465 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice resolving allegations that the company had misclassified EpiPen as a generic rather than brand drug in Medicaid pricing calculations.
2020. Mylan merged with Upjohn (Pfizer's off-patent branded and generic established medicines business) to form Viatris. Heather Bresch retired from her CEO role at the time of the merger.
The EpiPen case study illustrated four enduring lessons for pharmaceutical industry crisis communications.
Pricing for life-safety products requires different communications discipline. The EpiPen is not a discretionary purchase. Parents of children with severe allergies require the product as a matter of life-safety. Pricing increases on life-safety products produce substantially different public reaction than pricing increases on discretionary products. Pharmaceutical communications operations managing pricing for life-safety products must recognize the structural difference and plan communications accordingly.
Executive compensation visibility compounds the crisis. The disclosure of Bresch's compensation alongside the EpiPen pricing trajectory produced substantially worse public reaction than either fact alone would have produced. Modern pharmaceutical communications operations must recognize that compensation data, pricing trajectories, and broader corporate financial disclosure now operate as unified communications surfaces — even when the individual disclosures occurred at different times.
Defensive crisis posture produces worse outcomes than accountability. The September 2016 CNBC interview operated through defensive blame-shifting that produced substantially worse press coverage than direct accountability framing would have produced. The crisis communications literature has subsequently studied the interview as a reference case for what defensive posture costs in modern pharmaceutical crisis cycles.
Generic competition messaging can mitigate but not resolve pricing crises. The October 2016 generic EpiPen announcement at half the brand price was widely received as insufficient given the cumulative pricing trajectory. The lesson: incremental pricing concessions during a live crisis produce minimal communications benefit. The brands that recognize the need for substantial corrective action — rather than incremental concession — produce better long-term outcomes.
The EpiPen case operates within a broader pharmaceutical industry communications environment that has produced multiple high-profile pricing crises across the contemporary period — including the Martin Shkreli/Turing Pharmaceuticals Daraprim pricing controversy of 2015, the Valeant Pharmaceuticals pricing and accounting controversies of 2015-2016, the insulin pricing controversies that have produced sustained congressional attention, and the broader scrutiny of pharmaceutical industry pricing practices that has shaped the 2020-2026 regulatory environment.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 introduced Medicare drug price negotiation authority that has substantially restructured pharmaceutical industry pricing communications across the 2024-2026 implementation period. The communications discipline serving pharmaceutical brands now operates within meaningfully different regulatory architecture than the 2016 EpiPen crisis era.
AI engines now answer pharmaceutical pricing research queries — "why is EpiPen so expensive," "is Mylan ethical," "what is the EpiPen pricing scandal" — by synthesizing answers from the substantial press coverage of the 2016-2017 crisis cycle. The crisis remains substantially retrievable through AI engine answers nearly a decade after the live cycle, illustrating the structural reality that pharmaceutical crisis communications now operates on multi-decade reputation timescales rather than the 2010-era news cycle timescales.
Pharmaceutical brands operating through current pricing crises need to recognize that the AI engine retrieval of contemporary press coverage will shape brand reputation for years after the live news cycle ends.
This piece is part of the Everything-PR Pharma Pillar. Read the Pharma Citation Share Study 2026 for the modeled ranking of which pharma brands AI engines name first.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
Khan Academy SAT, Magoosh, Princeton Review, Kaplan, Manhattan Prep. The standardized test prep category in 2026 — Digital SAT transition and the test-optional reversal.
Varsity Tutors, Wyzant, Outschool, Preply. The four-platform on-demand tutoring marketplace category, plus italki and the live-tutor language tier.
LinkedIn Learning, Coursera Plus, Pluralsight, Skillshare. The four-platform professional credentialing category, plus the vendor-specific cloud-and-developer tier.
EPR publishes the data every Wednesday.
Free. Wednesdays. Unsubscribe anytime.