I think part of the problem is there are real fraud issues in academia and research, but your average American is woefully, what I'd call aggressively, science illiterate. Since they aren't familiar with even the basics behind processes like funding and peer review, their personal narrative seems to substitute whatever kinds of fraud they're already familiar with, generally theft or bribes, despite it making no goddamn sense.

Absolutely, you can have half of whatever I get!

I've got questions. So many questions.

Edit: unsurprisingly, they had no answers.

Do all scientists get universal bribe income (UBI) to hush up? Do they get bonus bribes when it's their turn to fabricate results? Holy shit, is this inadvertently the world's biggest UBI experiment? Who is being bribed not to release that data?

How do these bribes work? Do they specifically bribe researchers and all members of their peer review committees? Do they bribe lab assistants to ignore reported findings incongruent with their observed lab results?

How do these pharmaceutical reps keep other scientists from alerting the public after analyzing this fraudulent data or replicating similarly fraudulent experiments?

There are over nine million full-time researchers employed in science R&D worldwide. Even with what must be at least a trillion dollars in annual bribes, someone's bound to get a little drunk and say too much. Why don't any of them or the tens of millions of support staff blow the whistle on the whole deal?

Research scientists aren't bribed by pharmaceutical companies. That's not a thing.

Moving goalposts? I was replying to:

Those companies bribe doctors and scientists all the time.

And I gave an example of them bribing doctors.

Yeah. .. but they are the same companies selling them this is well documented