Firstly: the notion that there's something absurd in my being able to profit from work some pharma research did in an earlier era is itself absurd; if you really believe that under no circumstance is that warranted, you wind either being against patent expiry at all (b/c why would it suddenly become ok just b/c some years have passed) -- which is a tenable but very minority position -- or you have to concede that there's no general principle against such situations, at which point we can get to arguing details.
That's why it's LOL-worthy; it's already the case that it's totally fine to "profit" from work done earlier without compensating the person who did it, provided that the work was done sufficiently long ago (so as to have fallen out of whatever ip bracket it fell into)...which means the argument-from-principles is just ignorant, and the real argument is "do you consider exigent circumstances to also justify such "profiting" from previously-performed labor in the same way that "the passage of time" justifies the same, or not.
Reasonable people can disagree on the latter topic; arguing that my argument somehow fails because it violates a principle that is also violated by all the world's systems of intellectual property is a position you can take, at the expense of revealing yourself to be holding a position contrary to pretty much all the serious thought on IP in general.
But let's move along. The notion of "withholding his labor" is manifestly silly: he created knowledge, knowledge is not excludable once distributed, so there's no intrinsic ability to "deny" future-time use of already-produced-and-distributed-knowledge...whatever ability Joe has to "deny his labor" in this specific case is a gift from those he would deny it to.
This makes the programmers-versus-ditch-diggers a red herring: programmers get paid what they do because they can deny their labor if they're not paid a satisfactory wage (they stop working, it's that easy); a knowledge-producer can't deny use of already-distributed knowledge in anything like the same way, and depends on the state's willingness to enforce certain rules for what capacity to "deny labor" that way.
Which of course means that yes it is imprudent not to mollify righteous thugs in other nations; those righteous thugs are the means by which a pharma company would be "denying its labor" in that nation, and failing to strike a mutually-agreeable bargain leaves you unlikely to be able to do any denying, at all.
That's reality and that's the scope of options within pharmas operate (and indeed they know this probably better than you and have made their choices, etc.); you are free to dislike it and find it unpleasing -- perhaps curse fate for not evolving a cerebral cortex with a functioning drm system -- but making choices based on the actual nature of reality is probably the only way to make good choices short of luck.