Your question is actually a subset of:
"Can short-term-gain actually fatally undermine long-term-viability?"
I don't consider the question incorrect, at all.
Peter F. Drucker, in one of his books, has it that the "Health Care Industry" hired him,
and one of the 1st things he did, was..
told them, bluntly to their face, directly, approximately that
( this gets the gist of it, but this is from-memory, not exact/verbatim )
"You aren't the Health Care Industry, you are the Illness Care Industry, and you aren't fooling anybody, AND you aren't improving your credibility by speaking falsely"
Does taking all kinds of chemicals, so that one can be a "better bodybuilder", and then ending up in a population who dies significantly younger than average, due to heart-failures, be considered "good"??
Obviously, to the corporate-"persons" who make money having as much of the population addicted to that distortion as possible, YES!! PROFITS!!
Unfortunately, it isn't possible, in any political system, to get decisions made by correctness, accuracy, reason, objectivity, maximum-benefit-for-greatest-number-of-dimensions-of-the-population, etc..
The lobbies won't allow that.
Remember Covid?
Remember the people who were insisting that immunization was a scam, & that people should be relying on their body's innate robust immune-system?
These were people who consider yogic-living to be corruption, and heavy-meat-eating to be "good", nitrates in meats, & all.
The lobbies have overrun all discussion, not allowing objectivity to own any territory.
I think you are right, but the right-answer to it includes simultaneously improving the health of individuals, of entire-populations, AND getting people out immersed in nature more, so as to have built-up more-powerful immune-systems, in the 1st place!
Selectively extinguish some infectious-diseases ( I'd target rabies, ebola, HPV because it causes cervical cancer, & a few others, for extinguishment ), while dealing-with as many as we viably can,
in the hopes that "surprises" will not be able to trash/wreck our innate immune-systems, see?
_ /\ _