Board of directors at Pfizer should know better - if they were smart, they would have realized the optics of having a former media executive on the board. Unfor

Board of directors at Pfizer should know better - if they were smart, they would have realized the optics of having a former media executive on the board. Unfortunately, they feed into the narrative that there is conspiracy between media and pharma, whether its true or not. Of course, they gain "insight" into building a media narrative by having Mr Smith on their board. Marketing is very important to pharma companies. [1, 2, 3] Perhaps having perceived conflicts of interest will be a long term problem for pharma. If the conspiracy keeps gaining momentum, congress might get involved. But on the other hand, pharma has lobbyists. Time will tell. EDIT - I am very surprised that there is so much resistance to the idea that pharma companies would do anything unethical. Even more surprised that someone flagged this post. The audience here seems to have a great deal of resistance to the idea that pharma companies would do anything criminal - in fact, they have, on many occasions [4] - 2 of the vaccine manufacturers, pfizer and J&J, have paid $4.5 Billion combined in settlements to the DoJ. And to be clear, those settlements to avoid public criminal trials and those are on the violations that they have been caught on - imagine the criminal actions that have not yet come to light. Pharma's PR must be working - the portion Hacker News audience comes to pharma's defense consistently. [1] https://www.csrxp.org/icymi-new-study-finds-big-pharma-spent-more-on-sales-and-marketing-than-rd-during-pandemic/ https://www.csrxp.org/icymi-new-study-finds-big-pharma-spent... [2] The current and last CEO of GlaxoSmithKline have marketing background, not science / medical backgrounds. Most of the time, pharma CEOs do not have scientific / medical backgrounds - https://nbhorwitz.medium.com/the-path-to-power-in-pharma-33904b5533a0 https://nbhorwitz.medium.com/the-path-to-power-in-pharma-339... [3] Just think about all those late night prozac / cialis / etc commercials you see on late night tv. [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_settlements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical...