A billion-dollar defendant doesn't need to win the public argument. It only needs to make the fight look unwinnable enough that the story stops being told. That's the actual function of a corporate PR machine — not persuasion, exhaustion.
A smaller plaintiff's team can't out-spend that operation, and shouldn't try to. What works instead is precision: one accurate, well-sourced account, placed with the right reporter, does more than a dozen press releases matching the defendant's volume. The Johns Hopkins case became a $190M story from a single AP wire, not a sustained campaign to out-shout a hospital system's own communications office.
A large defendant's statements are reviewed by committee, legal, and PR before release — which makes them slow and often generic. A plaintiff's account, properly vetted but not committee-designed, can be faster, more specific, and more human. That speed and specificity is the real counter to scale. You're not matching their machine. You're being the thing their machine can't produce.