The Dark History of Pfizer
Who Paid the Largest Criminal Fine in US History?
The Dark History of Pfizer
Who Paid the Largest Criminal Fine in US History?
In light of the recent Project Veritas investigation revealing Pfizer possibly engaging in shady virus-mutation research, the debate surrounding trust of Pfizer and Big Pharma more broadly has escalated in the public discourse.
Whatever the merits of the claims made by the Pfizer consultant in the Veritas video, people must not forget the central question: is Pfizer a trustworthy company that has historically operated with integrity and honesty? Previous CDC and FDA devotees have now begun questioning the newly minted noble status of pharmaceutical entities like Pfizer.
The major flaws in the initial Pfizer mRNA vaccine trials — and the dominant takeaway of them (“95% effective!”) should cause alarm on their own, but the answer to this question is crucial in understanding the motives, conflicts of interest, and reliability of the experimental vaccine shots that were widely distributed to the public.
Fortunately, investigating this question requires nothing more than a quick Google search and reading of several news articles in (previously Big-Pharma-skeptical) journalistic institutions such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, and others.
Pfizer’s corruption, lies, and fraud date back to at least 1994 when they agreed to pay $10.75 million to settle allegations from the Justice Department that they “lied to get Federal approval for a mechanical heart valve that has fractured, killing hundreds of patients worldwide.” By 2012, the defective heart valve resulted in over 600 deaths.
In 2008, The New York Times published an article entitled “Experts Conclude Pfizer Manipulated Studies.”
The piece begins with the following:
“The drug maker Pfizer earlier this decade manipulated the publication of scientific studies to bolster the use of its epilepsy drug Neurontin for other disorders, while suppressing research that did not support those uses, according to experts who reviewed thousands of company documents for plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the company.”
One of the key experts tasked with assessing the efficacy of Neurontin Dr. Dickersin, said that “of the 21 studies she reviewed, five were positive and 16 negative, meaning they did not prove the drug was effective. Of the five positive studies, four were published in full journal articles, yet only six of the negative studies were published and, of those, two were published in abbreviated form.”
The following year marked a bloody stain on the legacy of Pfizer as a fairly respected pharmaceutical company. In September of 2009, the U.S Justice Department announced a $2.3 billion fine on Pfizer, the largest healthcare fraud settlement in American history.
Pfizer pled guilty to a felony violation of the FDA due to mislabeling the painkiller Bextra with "the intent to defraud or mislead.” As the Justice department announcement reads:
“Pfizer promoted the sale of Bextra for several uses and dosages that the FDA specifically declined to approve due to safety concerns. The company will pay a criminal fine of $1.195 billion, the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the United States for any matter.”
The next year, in 2010, Pfizer was ordered to pay $142 million in damages for fraudulently marketing Neurontin (the same drug it was caught two years earlier manipulating the data for) to use for pain and migraines.
Dr. Tom Perry from an independent drug research group at the University of British Columbia, stated in a CBC article, “The much larger majority of people will not get any benefit and many of them will have chronic neurotoxicity or poisoning of the brain.”
That same year, Pfizer earned notorious headlines in outlets such as The Guardian after a leaked US embassy cable showed the company had hired private investigators to find evidence of the Nigerian attorney general’s corruption in attempts to blackmail him to drop legal action over the 1996 Trovan trial which resulted in 11 children killed out of 200 and dozens more physically and neurologically damaged.
Despite having agreed to pay $75 million to the trial victims’ families in 2009, the drug company still seemingly strived to blackmail the Nigerian AG in attempts drop the $6 billion federal suit against Pfizer (which was later mysteriously dropped).
Pfizer promoted the sale of Bextra for several uses and dosages that the FDA specifically declined to approve due to safety concerns. The company will pay a criminal fine of $1.195 billion, the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the United States for any matter.
Pfizer’s dark history continues much further.
The profit-oriented company has paid billions or millions of dollars for their drugs allegedly causing breast cancer in over 6,000 women (2012), lack of disclosure of serious kidney-related side effects (2013), bribing doctors and promoting the use of medications beyond approved use (2014), and much more.
Nothing exists in black-and-white. Despite Pfizer’s development of certain life-saving interventions, they are clearly incentivised by profits — not merely the greater health and safety of the public. Their history is laden with examples of reckless drug promotion for which health outcomes are not known. This stops short of proving in a court of law that they are actively trying to harm people.
What is certain is that their self-preserving devotion to profit-bolstering has clouded their judgment and driven them to put the public at great risk.
All of this ought to be recognised and maintained in the Covid discussion which bizarrely compelled many public commentators to argue such a “public emergency” ought to justify the blind glorification of, and trust in, Pfizer as a pharmaceutical industry motivated by nothing other than public health.
Unfortunately, this proved to be a dangerously erroneous presumption as the best available data on the adverse event rate of the Pfizer vaccine showed a serious adverse event rate of 1 per 10,000 vaccinees.
According to renowned Harvard biostatician Dr. Martin Kuldorff, theses figures are unacceptably high (compared to other vaccines on the market which produce adverse event rates in the ballpark of 1 per million):
“That is very high for a vaccine. No other vaccine on the market comes close.”
As I have previously covered, the “public health emergency” was never an emergency for the vast majority of healthy, non-elderly people — only a select few vulnerable groups were at serious risk. As a result, the driving fear of mortality behind the immediate, reflexive trust in Pharma companies like Pfizer was completely unwarranted and wholly irrational.
Those of us who remained sober-minded and didn’t cave to the Covid panic propagated by corporatist media didn't betray the objective reality of Big Pharma companies like Pfizer being vastly more motivated by profit than public health, often times at the cost of public health itself.
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