It wouldn't be the first time Big Pharma did something harmful to society in order to protect its profit margins. You don't seriously think there is a moral stance that leads one to conclude Big Pharma is benevolent and always looking out for humanity?
I would say that Big Food hiring food scientists to specifically tune the flavor profile of mass manufactured foods to never trigger satiation so that people would not stop eating them even when they are mechanically full is pretty evil.
Big food came into existence thanks to scientific advancements that enabled the world to meet the needs of its population, and that's a good thing. Fertilizers and industrial agriculture has been a massive boon to most of the world, but allowing companies that have private shareholders to commandeer the ship and start steering it in a way that best benefits those shareholders over the best interests of the rest of the world has, in my opinion, created a system that has turned a great good into a perfidious evil.
Sometimes the need to "win" an argument can come second. The story here is about corporate greed. I can easily imagine a team meeting where someone brought up the research and people knew it might hurt sales even if it turns out that its not replicable or anything. No one probably said "lets buy it out so people won't be cured", I assume it was an innovation manager pitching "we can make a new supplements formula based on the nutritional value of this diet". Business people agreed, knowing its a win-win. Next agenda item.
No, the key word here, is: trust. You have more of it than you should for Big Pharma, given that that the facts of historical precedent, combined with the economics of addiction that are clearly exploited by the industry, do not support such subservient trust.
Have you never thought about the Pusher and Junkie relationship, at industrial scale? Because that is what Big Pharma is all about.
I am familiar with the Oxycontin drug pushing scandal. However, that doesn't automatically mean I'm going to start trusting unsourced internet comments; that way lies ivermectin madness.
Yeah, the situation is far worse than the Oxycontin scandal alone, which is really just the tip of the iceberg and is not an outlier situation with this industry:
> American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and its subsidiary Pharmacia & Upjohn Company Inc. (hereinafter together "Pfizer") have agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice, to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products, the Justice Department announced today.
You should start being a lot, lot more suspicious of claims made by Big Pharma, and start holding them actually accountable for their very real crimes. Anything less is complicity with an industry well-known for exploiting the pusher/junkie equation.
