Of course they can.
Bollocks can they. The ideal that pharma wants is to keep you alive as long as possible in ill health.
Pharma doesn't make a dime from healthy people. If you think otherwise, you are an idiot.
This is an industry which has been shown repeatedly to lie about the efficacy of their products, with faked peer review journals, suppressed negative results, lawsuits, corruption etc...
And yet people trust that the companies who patented the H1N1 vaccine BEFORE the Mexico event have done testing and would never release a defective product, or put out a seasonal vaccine which is anything less than claim, despite the fact that the inserts accompanying their very own products state that vaccines have not been tested for long term carcinogenic, mutagenic and other effects.
The reason cancer hasn't been cured, and I've had medical professionals agree with me on this, is because they've yet to figure out how to make the cure more profitable than the treatment of the disease.
Sure, pharma don't want you dead. They just want you using their products for as long as possible, and have no interest in your good health. They want you in poor health, but not quite ready to die.
In no other avenue of life would people blindly trust a company to not mislead or try to make as much money as possible off them. Pharma answers to one thing just like every other capitalist venture. Shareholders. Their entire existence is to make money first.
I just get so angry with this blind worship of the pharmaceutical industry when they are not better than used car dealers who willingly sell you something which might kill you so long as there's profit to be had. McDonalds do it. Smith and Wesson do it. General Motors do it. Pfizer do it. GlaxxoSmithkline do it.
You're best interests are purely secondary.