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Some accuse Pfizer of profiteering during a pandemic. A brief look at their history reveals far worse, from staggering criminal fines to corruption on a global scale. Strangely, those once critical of big business suddenly don’t want to know about the skeletons in Pfizer’s closet.

Two years ago, few people had heard of Pfizer, Inc. Now the pharmaceutical giant from New York — one of the world’s largest — is a household name.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a boon for the company. Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, co-developed with German-based biotechnology company BioNTech, has already earned Pfizer profits to the tune of US$36 billion. Their 2.3 billion-dose rollout of Comirnaty, distributed in 90 countries, will likely be beaten in 2022 when 3 billion more are scheduled for rollout.

In a shrewd business move, Pfizer turned down large public grants in order to maximise profit margins. In the United States, for instance, they are making US$24.00 per vaccine dose, compared to AstraZeneca which took public money and agreed to sell at cost price for US$4.00 a dose.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with a multinational corporation making worthy gains for its investors. But using a global emergency to bring in such exorbitant sums is at least ethically questionable. Critics have rightly asked if it crosses the line from capitalism to crony capitalism.

It turns out that Pfizer has a long and decorated history of both. And much worse besides.

What’s odd about Pfizer’s record of corruption and criminality is how few people want to hear of it. In a bizarre flip-flop, those once critical of the ‘big end of town’ seem singularly uninterested in Pfizer’s laundry list of transgressions.

Pfizer:

• paid the biggest criminal fine in US history
• has paid billions in fines over decades
• ran illegal and deadly drug trials on Nigerian children
• bullied and silenced governments in vaccine contracts
• submitted tainted vaccine research to the FDA
• (almost) saw its vaccine data hidden for 75 years
• silenced staff on fetal cell vaccine testing
• does not have WHO support for vaccinating children

Don’t believe it? Read on.

1. Pfizer paid the biggest criminal fine in US history

In 2003, a drug sales rep from Florida blew the whistle on his own company. He believed Pfizer was promoting an anti-inflammatory pill, Bextra, for ailments far broader than its approved uses. As a result, patients were being put at risk of heart attacks, strokes and blood clots.

A six-year investigation uncovered serious unethical conduct that included illegal promotion of multiple drugs and paying kickbacks to compliant doctors. Bextra was taken off the market and Pfizer was ordered to pay US$2.3 billion in penalties and settlement fees. This included a US$1.195 billion criminal fine — the largest in U.S. history.

2. Pfizer has paid billions in fines over decades

Pfizer’s record-breaking fine is only a fraction of the penalties, damages and similar costs it has been forced to pay out in recent decades. It is a matter of public record that Pfizer has bribed doctors, committed environmental violations, covered up negative safety data, engaged in fraudulent marketing, and sold products that caused hundreds of deaths.

Project On Government Oversight is an independent watchdog that keeps a database of U.S. federal contractor misconduct. They have recorded 42 instances of malpractice at Pfizer since 1995, and US$6.5 billion in penalties. On its Violation Tracker, the watchdog Good Jobs First has logged 75 seperate violations by Pfizer with penalties totalling US$10.1 billion since the year 2000.

Endemic, habitual and predictable are apt descriptions for Pfizer’s scandalous conduct over the long term. What have they gotten away with that we don’t know about? And why would we assume they have reformed themselves in time for the latest pandemic?

3. Pfizer ran illegal and deadly drug trials on Nigerian children

One of Pfizer’s lesser known but most contemptible crimes was running an illegal drug trial on 200 Nigerian children. The experiments potentially caused 11 deaths and horrific side effects, including brain damage and organ failure.

In the year 2000, the Washington Post held an 11-month investigation into exploitative medical trials taking place in underdeveloped countries, called ‘The Body Hunters’. Part 1 of their series uncovered Pfizer’s secret tests in Africa:

Wall Street analysts said Pfizer might reap $1 billion a year if Trovan, as it was known, won approval for all its potential uses. Pfizer also wanted to test the drug for use against meningitis, including an epidemic strain. The company couldn’t find enough patients in the United States, so its researchers had come to Kano, among the dying.

Doctors working with Pfizer drew spinal fluid from the girl, gauged her symptoms and logged her as patient No. 0069 at testing site No. 6587 in experiment No. 154-149. They gave her 56 milligrams of Trovan.

A day later, the girl’s strength was evaporating, Pfizer records show, and one of her eyes froze in place.

On the third day, she died.

Pfizer records are explicit. Action taken: “Dose continued unchanged.” Outcome: “Death.”

Pfizer’s patients were under the impression they were receiving an approved drug. Instead, they had been co-opted, without consent, into an experiment that violated Nigerian and international law.

Again, Pfizer faced eye-watering fines for their misdeeds and ultimately paid millions to a Nigerian state government. But years later, WikiLeaks published cables indicating that Pfizer had blackmailed Nigeria’s Attorney General into dropping an additional $6 billion federal suit against the pharmaceutical company for the illegal experiments.

4. Pfizer bullied and silenced governments in vaccine contracts

In early 2021, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism released a report detailing how Pfizer bullied Latin American countries during Covid-19 vaccine contract negotiations. To secure a vaccine deal, the company made stunning demands. Argentina and Brazil were asked to put up sovereign assets such as federal bank reserves, embassy buildings and military bases as collateral.

As might be expected in a pandemic, most governments signing deals with Pfizer offered them indemnity — meaning taxpayers, not Pfizer, would compensate victims who suffer an adverse reaction. But Pfizer wanted more from some governments, demanding to be legally shielded from their own acts of negligence, fraud and malice. Pfizer even pushed Argentina to pass new legislation to clear the way for its agreement.

One government official described Pfizer’s conduct as “high-level bullying” and said it felt like they were being “held to ransom” to access life-saving medication.

Following this exposé, Public Citizen released a similarly damning report in October. They obtained copies of nine Pfizer contracts from around the world which “offer a rare glimpse into the power one pharmaceutical corporation has gained to silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximise profits in the worst public health crisis in a century”.

Pfizer’s contract with Brazil prohibits its government from making “any public announcement concerning the existence, subject matter or terms of [the] Agreement” without the company’s written consent. The U.S. government is subject to similar conditions.

Without Pfizer’s express permission, Brazil cannot buy Pfizer vaccines from other nations, distribute them to other nations, or even transport them outside of Brazil. Nor can the nation accept donations of the vaccine: to do so would be considered an “uncurable material breach” of their agreement, whereby Pfizer immediately terminates the contract and Brazil still pays in full.

According to the United Kingdom’s agreement with Pfizer, UK courts do not decide contractual disputes between the two parties. A secret panel of three private arbitrators get to resolve such matters under International Chamber of Commerce rules, and all outcomes must be kept secret.

Australians would do well to ask what deals Pfizer struck with our government that are not yet in the public domain.

5. Pfizer submitted tainted vaccine research to the FDA

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals. In November last year, the BMJ published an investigative report exposing serious data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial.

Pfizer had hired a research group called Ventavia to enrol over 1000 participants in a trial that would yield vital data to world governments on the safety and efficacy of their Covid-19 vaccine. But a regional director employed at Ventavia, Brook Jackson, witnessed serious negligence in relation to the trial. She lodged multiple complaints with the company. Ignored, Jackson then emailed her concerns to the FDA. Later the same day, Ventavia fired her.

Brook Jackson told the BMJ that Ventavia “falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial”. She also reported that patients were left unmonitored, vaccines were stored at incorrect temperatures, lab specimens were mislabeled, and Ventavia staff who reported such problems were targeted.

Chillingly, less than a week after the BMJ published its whistleblower report, Facebook began giving it “misleading” and “false information” labels. Facebook’s “fact checker” smeared the BMJ as a “news blog” and their report as a “hoax”, while providing no assertions of fact that the BMJ got wrong.

The FDA never investigated Jackson’s allegations. Within months, the agency had approved the vaccine for use.

6. Pfizer (almost) saw its vaccine data hidden for 75 years

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relied on hundreds of thousands of pages of data in giving approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

When a group of scientists asked the government to make this data public in November 2021, the FDA requested a federal court to grant them until 2076, or 55 years, to do so. The agency said that releasing 500 pages per month was the best they could do with limited personnel — a hollow claim given that the FDA took only 108 days to review the data in the first place.

A month later, the FDA told the court they had more data than previously mentioned, meaning they would need 75 years to release it all, extending the timeline to 2096.

America’s national media and the public were rightly outraged at this request. How could people be asked to “trust the science” if the science was to remain hidden until long after their death?

Fortunately, a federal judge from Texas recently made a more sensible ruling, giving the FDA eight months to release its 450,000 pages of data.

Though Pfizer was not directly involved in this legal tussle, its ruthless contract negotiations at least raise questions about the company’s influence over national drug regulation agencies.

7. Pfizer silenced staff on fetal cell vaccine testing

The use of fetal stem cells in the development of vaccines is a serious ethical issue for some people, particularly those who are religious. As such, public health bodies like the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) offered assurances early on that:

For those patients who refuse a [Covid-19] vaccine that is developed in a cell line that was derived from an abortion, alternatives exist: for instance, mRNA vaccines as a class are not designed, developed or produced in fetal cell lines.

While some were satisfied with the mRNA alternatives, other members of the public were still opposed due to reports that fetal cell lines were used during the testing phase of these vaccines.

Such concerns were born out when a Pfizer whistleblower leaked internal emails to Project Veritas, revealing that high-powered company executives wanted information on fetal cells kept from the public. The emails discuss a stringently-vetted, company-approved paragraph that was designed for answering outsider questions about its use of fetal cells. It reads:

Human fetal derived cell lines are not used to produce our investigational vaccine, which consists of synthetic and enzymatically produced components. One or more cell lines with an origin that can be traced back to human fetal tissue has been used in laboratory tests associated with the vaccine program.

In the correspondence, Vanessa Gelman, Pfizer’s Senior Director of Worldwide Research, urges staff members to use the first sentence but omit the second when discussing the vaccine with the media, lawmakers and the public. “We want to avoid having the information on fetal cells floating out there,” she wrote, adding, “We have been trying as much as possible to not mention the fetal cell lines.”

Given how important religious exemptions are in nations like the U.S., the intent of top Pfizer executives to hide plain facts from the public raises serious ethical questions.

8. Pfizer does not have WHO support for vaccinating children

In December 2021, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) provisionally approved the Pfizer vaccine for children aged 5 to 11 years. But they have done so against the advice of the World Health Organisation (WHO). In an article about the Pfizer vaccine updated this month, under the subtitle, ‘Who should not take the vaccine?’ the WHO cautions:

There are currently no efficacy or safety data for children below the age of 12 years. Until such data are available, individuals below 12 years of age should not be routinely vaccinated.

The Pfizer vaccine trial, which is not testing enough children below the age of 12 to detect rare adverse events, is scheduled for completion in May 2023. In other words, children who take the Pfizer vaccine before this date are effectively part of the drug trial.

The TGA has so far received 265 reports of death in relation to the Pfizer vaccine, and 954 reports of myocarditis (The TGA has not necessarily reviewed these cases or confirmed a causal link). Hundreds of severe adverse events in children have also been reported in Australia, including several deaths.

Ironically, Covid-19’s infection fatality rate for children is 0.002%. In fact, according to the CDC, children are more likely to die from cancer, drowning, homicide, suicide or the flu than they are Covid-19.

Along with other Big Pharma companies, Pfizer has carved out an enviable business model. They enjoy free vaccine marketing thanks to dozens of national governments that have mandated their product. And the taxpayers compelled to take it foot the bill — not just for the doses but also for any injuries or deaths that result.

Pfizer may have the approval of drug agencies, the protection of “fact checkers” and lucrative government contracts, but their history of criminal activity and their exploitation of the Covid-19 pandemic invite comparisons to drug cartels and the modern-day mafia.

Serious reforms are needed at Pfizer if a discerning public is to be confident in their brand and products. Until then, do you trust Pfizer?

Image by Option Trader.