What if Access and Discovery were Equal Priorities?

After reading Ed Silverman’s “Caught in the Middle’: A Battle between Vertex and Insurers is leaving Cystic Fibrosis Patients with Crushing Drug Costs” from Stat News I felt Shakespeare’s words and Seabiscuit’s race weight. Patients, their physicians, and advocates are waiting and asking their own sets of “what ifs” as 2023 unfolds.      

The irony here is sharper than usual because 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. To learn more, read Silverman’s article and, for the backstory, Bijal Trivedi’s excellent Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever here. 

Robin Bates included this poem in his blog Better Living through Beowulf's March 27, 2023 post. I had to invoke the Bard. 
  
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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.

What if Access and Discovery were Equal Priorities? Collage.