Dumbest of This Week's 5 Dumbest: KV Pharmaceutical Goes Price Hiking

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- KV Pharmaceutical's (KV.A) arbitrary and blatantly greedy pricing strategy was considered the dumbest thing on Wall Street this week by readers of TheStreet.

As of late Friday, about 65% of the roughly 175 readers that took our poll thought that KV's decision to hike the price of its new prenatal drug was a particularly bad idea.

The company recently won the exclusive rights to produce a shot that helps prevent premature births. However, the shot that once cost about $10 will now cost $1,500.

"All the upfront development of the drug was done by the National Institute of Health," Dr. Kevin Ault, associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Emory University School of Medicine, told ABC. "You and I paid for that with our tax dollars, it's not like this pharmaceutical company is trying to recoup its investments in research and development, as is usually the reason for the price of new drugs."

The Food and Drug Administration's approval to grant KV exclusive rights to the product prevents the pharmacies that had been producing the shot from doing so anymore. It also prevents doctors from using anything but the KV formulation.

With approximately 16% of votes, Gilbert Gottfried's tasteless tweets making light of the devastation in Japan was voted the second dumbest thing on Wall Street this week.

Gottfried took to Twitter on Monday to make some inappropriate jokes about the tragedy in Japan. He was quickly fired as the voice of the Aflac (AFL) duck.

Aflac quickly cut ties with the comedian following a string of similar comments.

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