Pfizer

Pfizer   (Big pharma)
Formation	1849
Headquarters	New York City
Interest of	Ehden Biber, Tiffany Dover, Fazze, Owen Smith, Cristian Terheș, Vasudha Vats
Member of	Alliance for Biosecurity, Business Roundtable, Council on Foreign Relations/Corporate Members, Transatlantic Policy Network
Sponsored by	Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Exposed by	Michèle Rivasi
Subpage	•Pfizer/CEO •Pfizer/Vice President

Pfizer Inc. is a multinational pharmaceutical corporation. In 2012, it was one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and ranked 57 on the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue, a position it has reached through aggressive marketing and buying up competitors.

Mergers

Pfizer has a long history of mergers, partly for tax reasons, partly to get rid of competitors. In 2016, Pfizer was expected to merge with Allergan to create the Ireland-based "Pfizer plc" in a deal that would have been worth US$160 billion. The merger was called off in April 2016, however, because of new rules from the US Department of the Treasury against tax inversions, a method of avoiding taxes by merging with a foreign company. The company has made the second-largest pharmaceutical settlement with the United States Department of Justice.

On 19 December 2018, Pfizer announced a joint merger of their consumer healthcare division with UK pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline which maintains a controlling 68% of shares.

Products

Pfizer develops and produces medicines and vaccines for a wide range of medical disciplines, including immunology, oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, and neurology. Its products include the blockbuster drug Lipitor (atorvastatin), used to lower Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) blood cholesterol; Lyrica (pregabalin) for neuropathic pain and fibromyalgia; Diflucan (fluconazole), an oral antifungal medication; Zithromax (azithromycin), an antibiotic; Viagra (sildenafil) for erectile dysfunction; and Celebrex (also Celebra, celecoxib), an anti-inflammatory drug.

COVID-19 vaccine

On 9 November 2020, Pfizer and partner BioNTech announced that their vaccine against COVID-19 was exceeding expectations. In a press conference Ben Osborn, Pfizer’s UK managing director, "refused to explain why the company needed an indemnity."

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla instantly cashed in on the announcement, selling 60 percent of his Pfizer stock at $41.99, its highest level in more than a year. The sale had been arranged in advance under a so-called Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, which allows corporate executives to make predetermined stock transactions in compliance with insider trading laws. Bourla adopted the trading plan in August of this year.

Also Sally Susman, the company’s executive vice president and chief corporate affairs officer, dumped more than 43,000 shares to the tune of about $1.8 million. The sale was similarly made under a Rule 10b5-1 plan Susman adopted in November 2019.

The vaccine was the first to be tested in the United States to generate late-stage data. The companies said an early analysis of the results showed that individuals who received two injections of the vaccine three weeks apart experienced more than 90% fewer cases of symptomatic Covid-19 than those who received a placebo. For months, researchers have cautioned that a vaccine that might only be 60% or 70% effective.

The Phase 3 study is ongoing and additional data could affect results.

In keeping with guidance from the Food and Drug Administration, the companies will not file for an emergency use authorisation to distribute the vaccine until they reach another milestone: when half of the patients in their study have been observed for any safety issues for at least two months following their second dose. Pfizer expects to cross that threshold in the third week of November:

“I’ve been in vaccine development for 35 years,” said William Gruber, Pfizer’s senior vice president of vaccine clinical research and development. “I’ve seen some really good things. This is extraordinary.” He later added: “This really bodes well for us being able to get a handle on the epidemic and get us out of this situation.”

Criminal and Unethical Activities

Cartel Pricing

• Pfizer has been at the center of controversies over price fixing for more than 50 years. In 1958 it was one of six drug companies accused by the Federal Trade Commission of fixing prices on antibiotics. The company was also charged with making false statements to the U.S. Patent Office to obtain a patent on tetracycline.

Withholding Safety Problems

• The US Food and Drug Administration expressed great concern about reports of dozens of fatalities linked to heart valves made by Pfizer’s Shiley division. In 1986, as the death toll reached 125, Pfizer ended production of all models of the valves. Yet by that point they were implanted in tens of thousands of people, who worried that the devices could fracture and fail at any moment.

In 1991 an FDA task force charged that Shiley had withheld information about safety problems from regulators in order to get initial approval for its valves and that the company continued to keep the FDA in the dark. A November 7, 1991 investigation in the Wall Street Journal asserted that Shiley had been deliberately falsifying manufacturing records relating to valve fractures.

Withholding Trial Results

• In 2004, in the wake of revelations about dangerous side effects of Merck’s painkiller Vioxx, Pfizer agreed to suspend television advertising for a related medication called Celebrex. The following year, Pfizer admitted that a 1999 clinical trial found that elderly patients taking Celebrex had a greatly elevated risk of heart problems.

Testing Dangerous Drugs in Africa

• In 2000 Pfizer was accused of testing a dangerous new antibiotic called Trovan on children in Nigeria without receiving proper consent from their parents. The experiment occurred during a 1996 meningitis epidemic in the country. In 2001 Pfizer was sued in U.S. federal court by thirty Nigerian families, who accused the company of using their children as human guinea pigs. In 2006 a panel of Nigerian medical experts concluded that Pfizer had violated international law. In 2009 the company agreed to pay $75 million to settle some of the lawsuits that had been brought in Nigerian courts. BBC reported on WikiLeaks cables that showed that Pfizer "used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout", the company hired investigators to find evidence of corruption on Nigerian attorney general to persuade him to drop legal action. The U.S. case was settled in 2011 for an undisclosed amount.

Lying and Digging Dirt on Opponents

Classified U.S. State Department cables made public in 2010 by Wikileaks indicated that Pfizer had hired investigators to dig up dirt on Nigeria’s former attorney general as a way to get leverage in one of the remaining cases. Pfizer had to apologize over the revelation in the cables that it had falsely claimed that the group Doctors Without Borders was also dispensing Trovan during the Nigerian meningitis epidemic.

Bribery

In 1976 Pfizer was one of the many companies that disclosed that it had made questionable payments to foreign government officials. The company said that about $265,000 had been paid to officials in three countries but did not identify them.

In August 2012 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it had reached a $45 million settlement with Pfizer to resolve charges that its subsidiaries, especially Wyeth, had bribed overseas doctors and other healthcare professionals to increase foreign sales.

Firing Employees for Raising Safety Concerns

In 2010 a US federal jury awarded $1.37 million to a former Pfizer scientist who claimed she was sickened by a genetically engineered virus at a company lab and was then fired for raising safety concerns.

 

An event carried out

Event	Location	Description
Foster child drug trials	New York US	National Institutes of Health and Big Pharma force fed experimental pharmaceuticals to infants, toddlers, children and teenagers in New York and elsewhere in the United States.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
BioNTech	“Yes, I would love to get vaccinated too, we just have to see that we follow the legal basics. We will have to produce over 1.3 billion doses of vaccine in the next six months, it is important that there are no staff absences and accordingly we are thinking about finding ways that legally allow us to protect our staff as well. But we have, that is still in the clarification at the moment.”	Ugur Sahin	December 2020
COVID-19/Resistance	“I have done my bit and been vaccinated because we were told that was the route to protect others and regain our freedoms. Neither was correct. I will not allow my perfectly healthy body to become a cash cow for Pfizer.”	Allison Pearson	9 December 2021
Dominic Cummings	“In March [2020] I started getting calls from various people saying these new mRNA vaccines could well smash the conventional wisdom. [. . .] People like Bill Gates and that kind of network were saying. [. . .] Essentially what happened is, [. . .] there is a network of people, Bill Gates type people, who were saying completely rethink the paradigm of how you do this.. What Bill Gates and people like that were saying to me and others in number 10 was you need to think of this much more like the classic programs of the past. [. . .] the Manhattan Project in WWII, the Apollo program.. But what Bill Gates and people were saying [. . .] was, the actual expected return on this is so high that even if does turn out to be all wasted billions it's still a good gamble [. . .] and that is what we did.”	Dominic Cummings	May 2021

 

Employees on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed	End	Description
Hans Groth	Senior Director for Healthcare Policy & Market Access	1988	2012	Attended 2011 Bilderberg.
Owen Smith	Head of Policy and Government Relations	2005	2010

 

Sponsor

Event	Description
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation	Very influential and rich foundation established to take leadership of global health.

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial	article	2 November 2021	Paul D Thacker	Whistleblowers from a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial say never experienced such a “helter skelter" work environment, saying speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety.

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