There are many users on HN with anti-science bias, data means nothing to them

Yeah, and most of them root for Pfizer because "private for profit company == science"...

I run in some fairly lefty circles and I can safely state I've never heard of anyone (of ANY political leaning) "root for Pfizer" edit: except their actual paid PR people.

And anybody who holds significant shares of their stock.

No, the folks I know are more likely to sell stock they don't like than cheer for it against their own principles. That's assuming they buy individual stocks, which most people don't.

Those people don't hold an amount that's significant, though.

Thus we're a long way from the "most of them" I was replying to. Unless you're claiming that a majority of people hold a significant amount of Pfizer stock, I don't think we're disagreeing here?

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No, it's the opposite. The vast majority of studies have dubious methodologies or samples, draw dubious conclusions or extrapoltions using dubious models. Hence the replication crisis.

It's perfectly fine to be skeptical, moreso when colossal monetary incentives are in place.

But, unlike what the HN guidelines say, I think you already know this and that your comment is in bad faith.

Then it should be trivial for you to do exactly what the parent comment asked for and provide an example rather than calling it a bad faith argument.

Kind of think your comment is in bad faith....

I don't know if anything ever came of it, but a whistleblower in their covid vaccine trial alleged data issues and ignoring negative side effects:

> A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial. Staff who conducted quality control checks were overwhelmed by the volume of problems they were finding. After repeatedly notifying Ventavia of these problems, the regional director, Brook Jackson (video 1), emailed a complaint to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Ventavia fired her later the same day

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635

Even things like "Advertising where they shouldn't be" are not neccessarily innocuous; e.g. it can be promoting use of a drug in a situation that is known to be unsafe. In lawsuits regarding Bextra (which Pfizer ended up settling for around 1b),

> the state alleged that despite the significant safety concerns that led FDA to reject a request to market high dose Bextra for acute and surgical pain, Pfizer conducted a systematic, multi-pronged “off-label” promotional campaign for these very indications.