After seeing people being critical about how Ratchet handled Pharma on Delphi, I decided to share this here too. Please feel free to disagree with me when I say that hardly anyone could react to what Pharma did with empathy, especially Ratchet.
I'll preface this by saying Ratchet's a workaholic who based his entire identity on being a doctor. We can see this with him setting up a clinic in the Dead End in his free time instead of taking up a hobby. And that he decided to stay and help his patients over going on the run in the aftermath of Shadowplay. In summary, Ratchet prioritizes the lives of his patients over his own well-being.
We see this in Delphi when he transformers, triggering his own case of rust plague, to save a patient whose life support had been sabotaged by Pharma. Importantly, Ratchet also stays behind to save patients and only goes after Pharma himself when Fort Max can't. Ratchet goes unarmed and initially tries to talk down Pharma. People will bring up that Pharma had no other choice but Ratchet brings up choices such as closing Delphi, transferring, or even running away. Pharma's justification for that is that there would've been "too many questions". He doesn't say Tarn would've come after him, that there was no way off Delphi, or that he couldn't put in a transfer. While Pharma may not be in his right mind here given the paranoia nature of "too many questions", it's possible that Pharma was afraid of being demoted or even losing his medical license over Delphi. Either way, Pharma's violated the principles of what Ratchet thinks a medic should be--"do no harm"--, admitted that he was going to kill Ratchet as soon as he showed up, and there's also the matter of Ratchet's body rusting away.
At this point, Ratchet can't care about Pharma's wellbeing, not with the little time he's got to grab the cure and save the lives of others suffering from the rust plague Pharma created. In the end, perhaps what Ratchet needed to get through to Pharma was time. Unfortunately, they didn't have it nor guarantee Pharma being receptive to it, even if Ratchet was somehow able to look past a close friend's betrayal.
