Big Pharma

The suspicion industrial: real, documented scandals (opioid settlements, buried studies) feeding an undocumented folklore of cures withheld. The confirmed receipts keep the unconfirmed legends funded.

Big Pharma: the claim that drug companies suppress cures to sell treatments. Documented substrate: real convictions and settlements at industrial scale — GSK ($3B, 2012), Purdue's guilty pleas over OxyContin marketing, documented trial-data suppression (Study 329) — and the insulin pricing record. Documented counterweight: cures do ship (HCV cured by Sovaldi, profitably), and suppressing one would require silencing global competitors, regulators, and academics with opposite incentives. The lore takes true corporate malfeasance and extends it past the point where the incentive analysis breaks.