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Monday
Katy Giebenhain, a poet I met when she was the poetry and theology editor for the Seminary Ridge Review, advocates for access to essential medicines. In this role she alerted me to a poem where she channels Shakespeare to chastise the pharmaceutical company Vertex for “leaving cystic fibrosis patients with crushing drug costs.” The behavior is reprehensible because, as Giebenhain points out,
the carcanet of drugs that secured the company’s current profits and reputation exists because of massive early-stage nonprofit funding launched by patient families….The infusion of support to keep talented teams focused on developing these drugs was unlike anything experienced on the planet.
Or course, we’re not surprised at unscrupulous practices from drug companies. Big Pharma is notorious, of course, for hiking the cost of insulin, despite the inventor’s intentions, and Sackler-owned Purdue Pharma got America hooked on oxycontin. (While the Sackler family was fined $6 billion for its irresponsible behavior, it took in $10 billion in profits from the drug.) Most recently, we’ve learned that Moderna, which benefitted from government support during the Covid pandemic, is planning to charge $130 for a COVID vaccine that costs only $3 to make. (Moderna made $19 billion in profits last year.)
It’s enough to make one vent, which is what Giebenhain does in “Shakespeare Addresses Vertex Executives.” While she told me she didn’t have any particular play in mind, the Bard is a master at having characters deliver insults. There’s Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew (“Away thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant”) and Falstaff (“Thou art a very ragged wart”), but my favorite is Kent unloading on the shameless sycophant Oswald:
Kent Fellow, I know thee.
Oswald What dost thou know me for?
Kent A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.
Now Giebenhain:
Shakespeare Addresses Vertex Executives
Rascals. Wallet-pressing blockheads.
Ye did not build this alone.
Reconsider. Be your brilliant selves instead –
not rascals, not wallet-pressing blockheads.
Reconsider! Be your brilliant selves instead
of nook-shotten, overblown
rascals. Wallet-pressing blockheads,
Ye did not build this alone.
In his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, Barack Obama pointed out, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” Giebenhain makes the same point, only with a bit more spice.