When I say they, I don't mean the faceless corporation or brand, but the individuals who made this decision, ran the initial trials and pushed it to start with.
Hopefully they're scared shitless right now because of the talk around the GM recall case. Politicians are throwing around the idea of criminal charges because they didn't disclose safety problems soon enough. My first thought was "what about pharma?" Not sure what I think of the idea, but some folks in pharma are certain to be following that case.
Earlier this year a doctor killed a family member of mine by telling her, across multiple visits in the same week, her swollen ankle was a sprain and to just rest. It was actually a blood clot due to being overweight and on birth control pills. The day after her last visit, she threw a PE and died alone on her couch.
Another doctor told another family member his chest pains were end-stage cancer and he would die within a month. A second opinion showed it was mesothelioma treatable by state-of-the-art radiotherapy delivered by only one lab in the country. He's still alive two years later.
I've probably got another half dozen stories just from immediate relatives about doctors seemingly doing random or nonsensical things instead of driving proper diagnoses and/or treatments forward.
Doctors are in general awful unless you can afford to buy an entire private "council of doctors" to consult and berate each other into actually getting shit done.
With the pharmaceutical industry, however, there is no such check. To go against Pharma as a Republican is to go against big business. To go against Pharma as a Democrat is to go against "Science." Add millions and millions spent on lobbying and deceptive PR, you have a very powerful lobby.
There are very, very few true ideologues in Congress. The real reason is more prosaic - they won't cross big pharma because they need money for reelection.
Incidentally, the other industries you've listed don't have parties against them. They spread money around on both sides of the aisle.
How many Democrats are critical of pharmaceutical companies? Barely any.
Let's say the Congress wants to pass something the banks like, and they have 50 more votes than they need. The party leaders figure out who represents districts that won't like the legislation and those representatives get to vote against. In the end it's a super close vote, on paper, so 49 Congressmen can go back to their district and say "Gosh, I did my best, but we just couldn't stop it."
Look at the Iran deal. Treaties need 60 votes to pass the Senate. Now, Republican voters don't like the treaty, but the Republican establishment wants it to pass. So what do they do? They pass a bill that assumes consent and sets up a second vote that will only stop the treaty if 60 vote against it. Then they go back to their districts and pretend the second vote was the real one.
They do.