When it comes to pharmaceutical predation, the mild-mannered Azar puts blowhard “pharma bros” like Martin Shkreli to shame.

Nominating Alexander Azar to run Health and Human Services is like pinning a sheriff’s badge on Billy the Kid. For all his polish and small-town charm, when it comes to pharmaceutical predation, the mild-mannered Azar puts blowhard “pharma bros” like Martin Shkreli to shame.

Shkreli is the pharmaceutical exec people love to hate. That’s understandable. He sought out rights to drugs for rare diseases so he could extort outrageous prices from those whose lives depended on these treatments.

Shkreli became wealthy through his shameful strategy for extortion, but was convicted of defrauding investors in August. His smug narcissism and openly corrupt bullying made him an easy target, and a poster boy for pharmaceutical industry greed.The guy’s face tells the whole story. He even reportedly paid $2 million for the only copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album just so that the group’s millions of fans could never hear it.

Photos of Azar, on the hand, usually display a warm and open smile. “Trust me,” it seems to say. This smalltown graduate of Dartmouth and Yale, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, doesn’t look or sound like a bare-knuckled capitalist. He might even make a fine dinner companion, capable of navigating both idle chit-chat and philosophical reflection with ease. He almost certainly orders the right wine, knows which fork to use, and never ever commits a faux pas over dessert and coffee.

He was a lobbyist, after all.

But when it comes to public harm, Azar puts Shkreli to shame. As horrible as Shkreli’s misdeeds were, some will dismiss them as the rogue acts of a bit player. Azar, on the other hand, is the ultimate pharmaceutical industry insider: he has gone through the revolving door from government to lobbying several times to ascend to the helm of pharmaceutical giant Lilly USA.

Azar’s face is the industry’s face, not just that of one corrupt fraudster. And his shame is the industry’s shame. And now the date has been set for his Senate nomination hearing: November 29.