Pfizer’s Long History of Unethical Behavior
Another COVID-19 vaccine maker, Pfizer, has been sued in multiple venues over unethical behavior,5 including unethical drug testing and illegal marketing practices.
In 2014, it was ordered to pay $75 million to settle charges relating to its testing of a new broad spectrum antibiotic on critically ill Nigerian children. As reported by the Independent6 at the time, Pfizer sent a team of doctors into Nigeria in the midst of a meningitis epidemic.
For two weeks, the team set up “within meters” of a medical station run by Doctors Without Borders and began dispensing the experimental drug, Trovan. Of the 200 children picked, half got the experimental drug and the other half the already licensed antibiotic Rocephin. Eleven of the children treated by the Pfizer team died, and many others suffered side effects such as brain damage and organ failure.
Pfizer denied wrongdoing. According to the company, only five of the children given Trovan died, compared to six who received Rocephin, so their drug was not to blame. The problem was they apparently never told the parents that their children were being given an experimental drug.
What’s more, while Pfizer produced a permission letter from a Nigerian ethics committee, the letter turned out to have been backdated. The ethics committee itself wasn’t set up until a year after the trial had already taken place.
In his 2010 paper,7 “Tough on Crime? Pfizer and the CIHR,” Robert G. Evans, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor at Vancouver School of Economics, described Pfizer as “a ‘habitual offender,’ persistently engaging in illegal and corrupt marketing practices, bribing physicians and suppressing adverse trial results.” Between 2002 and 2010 alone, Pfizer and its subsidiaries were fined $3 billion in criminal convictions, civil penalties and jury awards.
Such sums did nothing to deter bad behavior. In 2011, Pfizer agreed to pay $14.5 million to settle federal charges of illegal marketing,8 and in 2014 they settled federal charges relating to improper marketing of the kidney transplant drug Rapamune to the tune of $35 million.9
The Corporate Research Project also details Pfizer’s history of bribery, environmental violations, labor and worker safety violations and more.10 Pfizer has also been
bullying countries to put up sovereign assets as collateral for expected vaccine injury lawsuits resulting from its vaccine.
Pfizer’s Vaccine Plant Has History of Recalls
A March 10, 2021, article11 by KHN also highlights persistent, long-standing problems at Pfizer’s vaccine plant in Kansas, which is slated to start producing COVID-19 vaccines:
“The McPherson, Kansas, facility, which FDA inspectors wrote is the nation’s largest manufacturer of sterile injectable controlled substances, has a long, troubled history. Nearly a decade’s worth of FDA inspection reports, recalls and reprimands reviewed by KHN show the facility as a repeat offender.
FDA investigators have repeatedly noted in reports that the plant has failed to control quality and contamination or fully investigate after production failures.
The 1970s-era manufacturing site has had persistent mold concerns over the years and been the focus of at least four intense FDA inspections since Pfizer took over its operations in late 2015, when it acquired Hospira.”
The plant is going to be a fill-and-finish site for the Pfizer vaccine. The question is whether the site has really cleaned up its act, or whether contamination might become an issue.
"The facility’s record of recalls and field alerts include vials of medication that contained glass and cardboard particles and, as one customer complained, a ‘small insect or speck of dust,'" KHN reports.
“A 2017 FDA warning letter … said the contaminants such as cardboard and glass found in vials posed a ‘severe risk of harm to patients’ and indicated that the facility’s process for manufacturing sterile injectable products was ‘out of control.’”