Not true, and it is very common for shorts to trash a stock when a company is awaiting approval and even after approval.
You should not be in this asset if you don’t know the space, but given your history, I doubt the primary interest you hope to gain from is a long position. Some people are swing traders and they own some long shares, but they seek to increase swings with non-stop negativity when they are trying to swing the price back down. So they can present themselves as “longs”, because they hang out for a long time and they often own some shares on a long basis, but at any given moment their primary interest can be the opposite of a long.
There are also many traders who are mostly short, but hold shares so that they can claim to actually be “shareholder activists”. This allows them to legally behave extremely badly, but always under the legal guise of “shareholder activist”, making prosecution difficult.