'Many patient-advocacy groups are lushly funded: last year, the Alzheimer’s Association’s revenue was about half a billion dollars. A study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that at least eighty-three per cent of the largest groups receive money from pharmaceutical companies. “H.I.V. activism was a true grassroots movement, not one funded by drug companies,” Daniel Carpenter, the author of “Reputation and Power,” a colossal history of the F.D.A., told me. “I don’t want to say everything since then has been astroturfed. But companies do learn the lesson of ‘Oh, that’s how you get a drug through the F.D.A.’'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/26/relyvrio-als-fda-approval