I am just going to start replying to people who say "You just want old people to die" with "You just want children to die from unnecessary vaccines." Two can play that god damned game. No, I don't want old people to die. And I assume they don't want children to die---but the big pharma companies that they just love, on the other hand...Well, even they don't likely want children to die either, they simply don't care if it is the cost of obtaining liability protection---they are trapped by a combination of sociopathy and bad incentives. (Vaccines recommended for children have liability protection that general vaccines don't. Ronald Reagan was right short run but wrong long run on this, it seems, much as he may have been with Afghanistan. I still respect the man though.)
The misbehavior of large corporations during this pandemic and during this election cycle has really shaken my faith in the Friedmanite paradigm. My guess, there is some sort of deep, structural policy failure that---at heart---is governmental that is causing this. But I will be more skeptical of both big government and big business for the rest of my life.
I think the policy failure that is responsible for all this might be the fact that the income tax is much higher than the capital gains tax---which produces a lot more vertical integration and mega-conglomerates than would normally exist in a free market. If you combine woke leaders of such conglomerates with bureaucrats constantly threatening anti-trust action, you have a recipe for government-like megacorporations that do the government's bidding and undermine Constitutional protections. ("But they are a private business," says the leftist who has recently rediscovered his libertarian backbone. "Surely, you want to allow private businesses to do as they see fit...What, I don't see any regulators telling them to do this; you must be paranoid; what, the senate hearings...those are just for show...")
How would having a much higher income tax than capital gains tax cause this? Because that tax structure discourages the paying out of dividends and encourages corporate reinvestment instead; you pay your stockholders more by increasing your stock's value through acquiring more companies than you do by paying out a dividend that would likely be reinvested with other companies. The result is way more vertical integration than one would normally expect and companies that own media assets in addition to their other holdings. We have created incentives for companies to just keep growing and growing. (And, of course, large corporations have efficiencies of scale with respect to regulatory compliance, so that too is a factor that encourages companies to become ever larger.)
I am not sure this is all that is going on: I do think the CIA has a hold on the media a la Operation Mockingbird, but the misalignment of our tax structures goes a long way to explain the surreal hell we find ourselves in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
My understanding of economics is too good for me to ever totally turn my back on free markets. They do work, but governmental failures can cause market failures, and we are witnessing one right now.
One irony is that the anti-trust law might actually be causing this strange behavior, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use it, nonetheless. You can fight fire with fire. And we may have to fight the strange consequences of the anti-trust law with the anti-trust law.