Joe Manchin has been making his rounds on cable TV recently to talk about the opioid epidemic, even saying that pharmaceutical companies should be held liable. But he has continued to evade one question: Should his daughter’s company stop selling Fentanyl?
In an interview last year, Joe Manchin said he didn’t know whether Mylan, his second largest donor and the company his daughter, Heather Bresch, serves as CEO of, sold opioids, but if they did he would “shut everybody down.” Well, Mylan is a manufacturer of Fentanyl, the drug recently described as driving the rapid rise in opioid overdose deaths across the country. Manchin’s close relationship with Mylan extends far beyond his daughter running the company. Manchin recently hired a Mylan lobbyist to run his campaign. And Manchin has been a staunch advocate for the company in the Senate, calling on his colleagues to be “open-minded” when investigating the pharmaceutical giant. So does Manchin think his daughter’s company should stop selling Fentanyl? Or will he let his personal ties to the company get in the way of doing his job?
“If Joe Manchin is serious about fighting the opioid crisis, he should start by calling on his daughter to stop selling Fentanyl, the drug driving the epidemic of overdose deaths across the nation,” said NRSC Spokesman Bob Salera. “Manchin’s silence when it comes to his daughter’s drug company shows that he’ll always put the Manchin family’s bottom line ahead of working for West Virginians.”