It's their standard mode of operation these days..float some radical suggestion via a proxy in a political rag, to see if it passes muster with their own mob and doesn't get the opposition outrage bus into gear...which this did.
When I read the approval, I did not note any felonies by Big Pharma. The fault appears to lie entirely with an Approval that didn't pass it's own standards, and a deliberate suppression of data by numerous government agencies. So, unless someone can prove undue influence on the agency personnel by Big Pharma, which I don't think has ever happened (although the influence is obvious, I don't think it's ever been proved), this is all government's fault.
We are a long way from the days of Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA Official who refused 6 times to approve Thalidomide for lack of proper testing, and later got a Presidential award from JFK for doing so. Interestingly, Kelsey was born and educated in Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey
There are a couple of points to highlight. The first is that Kelsey had a PhD in Pharmacology, had done research on drugs that caused birth defects, then picked up her MD as well later. She was thus qualified from all three main aspects of drug approval assessment.
The second is that she only got on to her PhD because the chap in charge at the University of Chicago was unaware that Frances in Canada is a girl's name (I have a niece with that name), assumed it was a variant of the boy's name, Francis, and thus offered her the place.