The lobbying activities in Washington, DC are still largely controlled by Big Pharma, which also spends billions of dollars annually on promoting pharmaceutical goods.
Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla claimed, during an interview in November 2021, that a small group of “medical professionals” who are intentionally circulating “misinformation” critical of the Pfizer vaccine narrative are “criminals.” This is in spite of the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is widely known to be riddled with widespread corruption.
It was as if Bourla had lost all knowledge of the history of his own organization.
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Pfizer Has A Prolonged Past Of Engaging In Criminal Activity
Pfizer came to an agreement in 1992 to pay between $165 million and $215 million to settle lawsuits that had arisen as a result of the fracturing of its Bjork-Shiley Convexo-Concave heart valve, which had resulted in nearly 300 deaths at the time and had resulted in 663 deaths by the time 2012 rolled around. The agreement was made in 1992.
Pfizer reached a settlement with the Justice Department in 1994 that required the company to pay $10.75 million to resolve allegations that the company had lied in order to obtain federal approval for a mechanical heart valve that had fractured and caused the deaths of hundreds of patients around the world. Pfizer also agreed to pay a total of $9.25 million over the next few years as part of the settlement in order to monitor patients who got the device at facilities run by the Veterans Administration or pay for its removal. The transaction was criticized by consumer rights activists, who urged government officials to bring criminal charges and lobbied for a steeper civil penalty for the multibillion-dollar company that had covered up safety concerns even as the device was killing patients. The activists also called for criminal charges to be brought against the multibillion-dollar company that had covered up safety concerns.
Pfizer conducted a clinical study in Nigeria in 1996 on a group of 200 children, during which they gave one of the children a medicine that was still in the testing phase. However, the parents were never informed that their children were participating in an experiment. Eleven of the infants did not survive the treatment, while a significant number of the remaining children had adverse consequences such as brain damage and organ failure. According to the findings of a study compiled by Nigeria’s Ministry of Health, the experiment was “an unlawful trial of an unregistered medicine,” “a clear example of exploitation of the uneducated,” and a breach of both Nigerian law and international law. Pfizer did not get the patients’ permission or notify them that they were the participants of an experiment and not the beneficiaries of a medicine that had been licensed for use in humans.
In 2002, Pfizer reached a settlement with the United States Department of Justice and forty individual states that required the pharmaceutical company to pay a total of $49 million to resolve allegations that it had committed fraud against those entities by overcharging for its cholesterol medication Lipitor. In the year 2001, sales of Lipitor were $6.45 billion.
To resolve allegations that it illegally advertised the medicine Neurontin for purposes that were not authorized by the FDA, Pfizer reached an agreement in 2004 to plead guilty to two crimes and pay a total of $430 million in fines. Pfizer admitted that the company actively promoted epilepsy medicine via illegal channels for a variety of unrelated diseases, including pain, migraine headaches, withdrawal from alcohol and drugs, and bipolar disorder. Pfizer’s strategies included paying physicians with expensive vacations and sending business agents undercover to attend medical education seminars where they were disguised as patients.
An article with the headline “Experts Conclude Pfizer Manipulated Studies” was published by the New York Times in the year 2008. In order to market their epileptic medication Neurontin, Pfizer intentionally delayed the publishing of negative studies, reinterpreted negative data so that it seemed in a more favorable light, and controlled the flow of clinical research data. Pfizer halted its marketing efforts for the medicine Neurontin in 2004, the same year that a generic version of the medication was made available. In the same year, the corporation agreed to pay $430 million to resolve federal criminal and civil accusations that one of its companies had advertised the medicine for purposes that were not permitted by the appropriate authorities.