I used to dabble in biotech company stocks. i got burned on that. One company (I forget the name) had a new drug that was better than the “gold standard” in that classification and passed all testings and it just needed FDA approval. It never got it. Never heard a reason. But I stayed away from that field of stocks after that.
For reasons I won’t get into, an employee at, if I recall, FDA was investigated. He was responsible for approving some particular type of heart medications. Turns out in his twenty-plus year career he had NEVER approved a medication. He was fired. (The initial investigation was over a head problem.) He sued because his mandate was to prevent deaths from new medications. He successfully argued that he had met his mandate, and the court required his reinstatement.
Having spent a career dealing with government bureaucrats, I have a couple of observations. No power is exercised more vociferously than small power. Government is where C students find good paying jobs. And some people are just assholes. Government is where someone can achieve maximum asshole-ed-ness and nobody will fire him. I’ve had to deal with people it was absolutely necessary to please or lots of people would lose their jobs and those people would not last five minutes in a well-run company.