Nope, it is the thing the debian developer intended, without introducing any problems-- and was at the time. It's a bit opaquely named (it's named after an earlier tool, 'purify' that protested some of the same things valgrind did) which is presumably why the debian developer was unaware of it.

I believe most distros ship with it on these days because without it you can't really use valgrind on programs that use openssl. (Suppressions don't really work because the uninitialized data taints all downstream users of openssl randomness)