You can change your coffee brand in a single morning. Your razor takes a week. Your beer takes one trip to the store. Your medicine cabinet is the one shelf in the house you never really got to vote on. A doctor writes it, an insurer approves it, a pharmacy fills it, and four or five corporations you never chose end up with a standing monthly claim on your family budget.
So we ran the elimination. We pulled every company in our pharmaceuticals and biotechnology category carrying a published woke score, lined them up worst to best, and started crossing off names until something was left standing. This category fought back harder than any other we have scored.
Four Perfect Scores. One Industry.
Most categories hand you one or two perfect scores. Big Pharma produced four.
Pfizer scores a 100/100. It hit every one of our six dimensions: comprehensive ESG reporting, aggressive DEI programs, Pride publications, a perfect HRC Corporate Equality Index rating, left-leaning political money, and the CEO Action pledge. Pfizer did make a change in February 2025, and it is worth being precise about what the change was. As STAT reported at the time, the company retitled its diversity page from "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" to "Merit-Based Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion." The page is still live. The word merit went in front. Nothing behind it came out.
Merck also scores 100/100, and it is the most honest company on this list, because Merck never pretended to retreat. In May 2025 the National Legal and Policy Center put an anti-DEI proposal to Merck shareholders. They rejected it by a margin of roughly 99 percent to 1 percent. That is not a company quietly holding the line under pressure. That is a company being told by its owners, overwhelmingly, to keep going.
Thermo Fisher Scientific takes a third 100/100: seven-plus consecutive years of perfect HRC scores, roughly 78 percent Democrat-leaning political donations, more than 250 diversity group chapters, and approved science-based climate targets. Most Americans have never heard of Thermo Fisher. It processed a great deal of the lab work behind the last five years of American medicine.
AbbVie rounds out the perfect scores at 100/100 on the strength of published ESG Action Reports, extensive equity and inclusion programs, Pride employee resource groups, a perfect HRC rating, and a CEO Action signature.
The Rollback That Was Mostly a Rewrite
Here is where the elimination gets interesting, because the next name down is the one that actually did remove something.
Johnson & Johnson scores 90/100. In April 2025, according to HR Brew, J&J deleted its DEI landing page outright and scrubbed several other diversity and health-equity indicators from its website. That is a real, documented removal, not a rename. And the score still lands at 90, because the Care With Pride program still runs across a dozen-plus consumer brands, the HRC rating was still perfect, and the political giving did not change. Deleting the webpage is not the same as ending the program. It is the difference between closing the blinds and moving out.
This is the pattern across the whole industry in 2025 and 2026: the DEI retreat in pharma has been a disappearance story, not a cancellation story. Pfizer renamed. J&J deleted the page. Merck put it to a vote and won. All three still score 90 or above.
Working Down the Middle
Abbott comes in at 75/100, with strong ESG reporting, dedicated diversity reports, active Pride programs, roughly $5.7 million in political spending, and the CEO Action pledge. It missed a perfect score only on the HRC index.
Bristol-Myers Squibb lands at 59/100, the first name on the board that is not in extremely woke territory.
Then the distributors and the pharmacy counter, where most people actually hand over money. CVS Health scores 50/100, carrying a $600 million racial-equity commitment and a well-publicized run of inclusive advertising. Cardinal Health scores 45/100 behind a DEI steering council and its "We All Belong" campaign. McKesson scores 41/100, recognized as a top workplace for LGBTQ+ equality and running the rainbow logo each June, though it pulled back on PAC contributions.
UnitedHealth Group scores 36/100. It acknowledges Pride Month and features employee participation, but it does not aggressively campaign, and that restraint is the entire difference between 36 and 100.
The closest thing to a household-name survivor is AmerisourceBergen, now Cencora, at 20/100. Its DEI initiative collapsed early, it parted ways with its first DEI executive, and it drew a lawsuit in the process. It scores low mostly because the program never took root, which is a strange thing to hand out credit for. But the number is the number.
The Last Ones Standing
And that is the end of the household names. Every major drugmaker, distributor and pharmacy chain in our database scores 20 or higher, and eleven of the twelve score above 35. To find a genuine woke-free score in American medicine, you have to leave the Fortune 500 entirely.
All Family Pharmacy scores 5/100. It is an independent online pharmacy based in Boca Raton, Florida, built around medical freedom and direct access to medication without the corporate apparatus.
CofixRX scores 3/100. Our research turned up no ESG agenda, no DEI bureaucracy, no Pride or HRC involvement and no left-leaning political activity. A family-run operation that sells a product.
Bizi Vitamin Honey also scores 3/100, making raw American honey vitamin sticks with no artificial ingredients and no political overhead. Agape Bioenergetic Health & Wellness scores 3/100, a small Christian owner-operated wellness practice in Strasburg, Pennsylvania.
The Verdict
The last woke-free names in your medicine cabinet are not drug companies. They are a Florida pharmacy, a family nasal-spray maker, a honey company and a Pennsylvania wellness practice. That is the honest answer, and pretending otherwise would not help anyone.
This category is different from coffee or razors, and it deserves to be said plainly: nobody should drop a prescription over a corporate score. That decision belongs to you and your doctor, not to a website. What you can control is the discretionary end of the shelf, which is larger than most people think. Vitamins, supplements, over-the-counter remedies, and where you fill and buy are all choices you actually make.
The scoreboard is worth remembering the next time a pharmaceutical company announces it is stepping back from all this. In 2025, one of them renamed the page, one deleted the page, and one put it to a shareholder vote and won by 99 to 1. All three still score 90 or better. The announcements changed. The scores did not.