Maker of sleeping pill Ambien responds after Roseanne blames drug for tweet: 'Racism is not a known side effect’

Ms Barr lost her show after writing a racist tweet

The maker of Ambien blasted back at Roseanne Barr after the she faulted the sleeping pill for a racist tweet that led to her television show’s cancellation.

“People of all races, religions and nationalities work at Sanofi every day to improve the lives of people around the world”, Ambien manufacturer Sanofi US said on Twitter.

“While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication”.

As of early afternoon on the East Coast, some 90,000 people had liked or shared the tweet.

A resoundingly popular revival of the 1990s sitcom “Roseanne” was pulled off the air this week after Ms Barr issued a racist tweet describing Valerie Jarrett, a former adviser to Barack Obama, to the product if “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby”. Ms Jarrett is African-American.

After ABC executives swiftly moved to cancel the show, with president Channing Dungey blasting the statement as “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values”, Ms Barr sought to attribute the bigoted missive to medication.

“It was 2 in the morning and I was Ambien tweeting-it was memorial day too-i went 2 far & do not want it defended-it was egregious Indefensible”, Ms. Barr tweeted.

While the White House told reporters that Donald Trump was focused on policy matters and was “not responding to other things”, the president weighed in by excoriating Bob Iger - the CEO of Disney, which owns ABC - for apologising to Ms Jarrett but not to Mr Trump “for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC”.

“Maybe I just didn’t get the call?” Mr Trump wrote.