I dunno about that. Those Emergen-C 1000mg Vitamin C powder packs work wonders for me. If it's been debunked then I got some kinda crazy placebo effect going on.
According to meta-analyses on the topic assessing doses of 200mg vitamin C or more, vitamin C has failed to reduce the frequency of colds in the normal population but was successful in reducing the duration of colds (on average 8-14%);[149][145] when looking at studies investigating extreme physical stress (marathoners and skiiers), the risk of getting a cold was halved (which has been noted in past meta-analyses[144])
Definitely not a marathoner/skiier but I work out about an hour a day and I never expect Vitamin-C to prevent colds. I only take it after 2 to 3 day of sensing an incoming cold.
I remember a recent study found that vitamin C had no effect on the period or severity of a cold but zinc did. Seems to be confirmed by this :- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15496046
Did you even read the article? Marketing had nothing to do with the "success" of this drug. Good and old FUD did. The drug was sold directly from Roche to governments. Typical HN bias, it's all marketing's fault. Next time just follow the money.
Totally agree with your second point. Add to that the fact that pharmaceutical companies market drugs directly to doctors which can yield prescriptions of useless drugs.
However, I disagree that they use normal marketing strategies with governments. They play politics instead. In this case they had the backing of the World Health Organization, and media outlets screaming words like pandemics every ten seconds. We all know that dead bodies don't look good on a politicians resume willing to run for reelection.
... But surely they prepared a lot of information to give to the WHO.
I agree that those materials were not glossy brochures and adverts with smiling mother and happy children, but those information packs are very definitely marketing and not just a dump of all the data they have.
That's partly why Cochrane had to struggle for so long to get the full data.