Yes. You never heard of that because seat belts became mandatory BEFORE the web spread so research on that topic, having much data to compare between those with and without seat belts was simply missed due to automakers interests.
3 point seat belts means much more visceral traumas, witch tend to be more serious and not immediate to spot than orthopedic traumas, also much more chest traumas where broken ribs perforate a lung or they make the heart explode. No seat belts (with tempered and stratified glass) means much more broken legs and arms, NOT much skull damage and NOT much visceral trauma.
Back then (my mother was a young emergency room surgeon) many doctors state that the idea of seat belt is good for 4 point anchoring who can dislocate or fracture your shoulders but no more, and in case of fire/drowning you can exit them without needing to cut them, but automakers oppose that because it means making much more expensive seats while three point seat belts are pretty cheap.
After there was a gazillion of additions to makes the three point seat belts less dangerous, some have tried a small "embedded airbag", some have tried "dynamic deceleration instead of a sudden block, but most of them dramatically fails. Embedded air-bags are simply too slow to open, too easy to misplace, too little absorbent, dynamic decelerators do sglitly better but they are still not dynamic enough and so on.
Another automotive scandal is about day lights on cars, they are pushed "because various studies have proven them to be useful", no one tell than those studies are only a couple and done in the Sweden Lapland in conditions where "day lights" are essentially "position light in late evening" for most other climate. But again they are useful to sell a bit more without any benefit.
There are many others, nothing so "devastating" but enough to understand that academia need to be public and TOTALLY, RELIGIOUSLY SEPARATED form the private sector to avoid the spread of "false commercial science" for some large enough lobbyist interests. Oh BTW you can try to dig the history witch tend to be less biased as the time passes, you'll find for instance some example from Eduard Bernays campaigns https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer like one for the British American Tobacco company where he literally create a scientific journal publishing some real scientific articles from small universities, young PhDs and so on gaining a certain traction thanks to a free distribution models among all doctors. Slowly he insert false, but realistic scientific papers stating how smoking is good for human health and many doctors believe them and recommend smoking as a healthy habit. In few years almost all doctors if interviewed they'll state "smoking is good for health".