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Few companies in the history of medicine have received as much
attention as Pfizer Inc. has received these last three years of the
Corona Crisis.
Charles Erhart was a confectioner.
Originally named Charles Pfizer and Company the business would initially focus on the production of chemical compounds. Their first product was a pharmaceutical called Santonin which was used to treat parasitic worms.
Combining their talents the cousins housed their product within tasty confections such as candy lozenges and toffee-flavored sugar cream cones. This strategy proved to be a success, setting the stage for the company's future development.
The drug Santonin would be used as an anthelmintic up until the 1950's, when it fell out of favor due to noted toxic effects which posed serious risks to patients.
Pfizer would quickly expand into the realm of fine chemicals for commercial sale to wholesalers and retailers.
In 1862, Pfizer would become the first U.S. company to domestically produce tartaric acid and cream of tartar.
With the outbreak of the American Civil War a massive need for painkillers and antiseptics erupted, creating an "opportunity" for the pharmaceutical industry.
Pfizer quickly expanded its production of both, as well as of,
By 1868, Pfizer revenues had doubled and its product line had increased substantially.
The big boon for the company would come in the 1880's with its production of industrial grade citric acid, widely used in soft drinks like Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper.
This would become the company's centerpiece and drive their growth for decades.
Another fortuitous change for the "small New York firm" would arrive in 1919, when its scientists would pioneer and develop a deep tank fermentation process, the principles of which would later be applied to the production of penicillin.
This prowess in fermentation and large-scale pharmaceutical production would put Pfizer in a lead position in WW2, when the US government appealed to the pharma industry for support in producing penicillin for the war effort.
Working with government scientists, Pfizer began pursuing mass production of penicillin utilizing its deep-tank fermentation technology and in 1944 became the first company to mass produce penicillin.
As penicillin prices and usage declined post-WW2, Pfizer began searching for more profitable antibiotics. The move into commercial production of antibiotics signaled a pivot in Pfizer's business model.
The company's operations shifted from the manufacture of fine chemicals to research-based pharmaceuticals, giving birth to Pfizer's new drug discovery program, which focused on vitro synthesis.
In 1950 Pfizer would develop its first proprietary pharmaceutical product, Terramycin, a broad-spectrum antibiotic.
By 1951, Pfizer had established offices in,
As its power and profits mushroomed, Pfizer would augment its portfolio through various acquisitions and entries into multiple areas of research and development, including an animal health division.
As the Pfizer pharmaceutical kingdom expanded, however, questions about salacious business practices began to surface.
VIOLATIONS
Despite portraying itself as a righteous corporate citizen, Pfizer is no stranger to controversies and scandals.
As early as 1958 it was one of six drug companies accused of price fixing by the Federal Trade Commission.
In 1961 the Justice Department filed criminal antitrust charges against Pfizer, American Cyanamid, and Bristol-Myers, accusing top executives at each company of charging egregiously high prices and monopolizing the production and distribution of drugs dating back to 1953.
In 1963 the FTC ruled that the accused companies in its 1958 complaint did in fact rig antibiotic prices.
The FTC also noted that,
By the 1960s, Pfizer was at its most diversified point in history, with interests ranging from pills to perfume to petrochemicals to pet products.
The company's shift toward bringing out new products culminated with the establishment of the Central Research Division in the early 1970s. A full 15% of Pfizer's revenue was directed to this research department.
This focus on innovation brought about Pfizer's development of blockbuster drugs, which are described as "drugs that generate at least $1 billion in revenue a year for the pharmaceutical companies that produce them."
While these drugs can be extremely profitable for pharmaceutical companies, the blockbuster drug business model presents certain long-term problems.
Beyond the time and money that goes into their development, there are the exigencies of patent issues.
Pharma companies see the "patent window" of 20 years as a severe limitation, since it often takes them a full decade to bring a new drug to market, thus shortening both the time allowed to reclaim profits from development costs and the time allotted to reap maximum profits from their new product.
Due to patent laws, the success of blockbuster drugs is often short-lived. Also, reliance on blockbusters means that if a product fails, the consequences for the manufacturer can be catastrophic.
Using this business model, the need for pharmaceutical companies to constantly produce blockbuster drugs is difficult to overstate. Naturally, they go to great lengths to protect their golden goose.
Accompanying Pfizer's string of blockbusters was a massive surge in the company's fortunes in tandem with a procession of controversial products, felony offenses and multiple fines - including the largest criminal fine in US history.
This was just the beginning of a series of high-profile scandals and legal problems that would come to define Pfizer's business-as-usual practices.
For instance, reports of serious issues surrounding a heart valve produced by Pfizer's Shiley division began to plague the company. This problem would result in the cessation of production of all models of the faulty valves by 1986.
A 1991 FDA task force charged that Shiley withheld information about safety problems from regulators in order to get initial approval for its valves. A November 7, 1991, investigation in The Wall Street Journal asserted that Shiley had deliberately falsified manufacturing records relating to valve fractures.
These fractures resulted in catastrophic consequences for numerous patients. By 2012 it was reported that 663 individuals had died as a result of the defective valves.
Pfizer ultimately agreed to pay between $165 million and $215 million to settle lawsuits related to the The Björk-Shiley Convexo-Concave Heart Valve.
It also agreed to pay $10.75 million to settle US Justice Department charges that it lied to regulators in seeking approval for the valves.
The parade of corrupt practices and legal problems that has come to define this pharmaceutical Leviathan was just getting underway.
From then on, Pfizer was cited and prosecuted for a litany of illegal acts ranging from,
...all the way to environmental and human rights violations.
In 1999 Pfizer pled guilty to criminal antitrust charges and agreed to pay fines totaling $20 million.
In that case, Pfizer was charged with,
In 2000 The Washington Post published a six-part exposé accusing Pfizer of testing a dangerous experimental antibiotic Trovafloxacin (trade name Trovan) on children in Nigeria without receiving proper consent from their parents.
Trovan was slated to become Pfizer's next blockbuster drug, according to Wall Street analysts, one of whom claimed,
But when the company was unable to find enough patients in the United States, its researchers went in search of new patients in Kano, Nigeria.
This unapproved clinical trial on 200 Nigerian children resulted in the death of 11 children. It is alleged that many more children later suffered,
In 2001 Pfizer was sued by 30 Nigerian families, who accused the company of using their children as "human guinea pigs."
The families contended that,
After years of legal battles, Pfizer agreed in 2009 to pay $75 million to settle some of the lawsuits that had been brought in Nigerian courts.
Trovan never became the blockbuster Pfizer had envisioned. The company admitted to stockholders it had "suffered a disappointment" with this experimental meningitis drug.
Trovan was never approved for use by children in the United States, so production was halted. The European Union banned it in 1999.
Below is a chronology of still more Pfizer misadventures.
Pfizer's underhanded tactics involving Neurontin also included bribing doctors with luxury trips and monies to promote the drug and planting operatives at medical education events.
Documents later came to light suggesting that Pfizer arranged for delays in the publication of scientific studies that undermined its claim for the other uses of Neurontin.
In one of these documents, it was found that a Neurontin team leader at Pfizer said,
Finally, in 2010, a federal jury found that Pfizer committed racketeering fraud in its marketing of Neurontin; the judge in the case subsequently ordered the company to pay $142 million in damages.
The fine was a combination of civil and criminal settlements relating to Pfizer's,
Pfizer pled guilty to,
The Justice Department also noted Pfizer had "allegedly paid kickbacks to compliant doctors and promoted three other drugs illegally: the antipsychotic Geodon, an antibiotic Zyvox, and the antiepileptic drug Lyrica."
When interviewed by The New York Times, former Pfizer sales representative John Kopchinski, who helped initiate the federal investigation, stated,
The criminal fine of $1.195 billion in that settlement still represents the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the United States for any matter.
Even after entering an expansive corporate integrity agreement with the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services as part of the 2009 settlement, Pfizer's unprincipled and injurious behavior continued. The band played on.
In 2010 The New York Times reported on Pfizer's admission that it had paid around,
The Times also mentioned that Pfizer had paid,
In reference to the amounts disclosed by Pfizer, Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and author of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, admitted that while she had no specific knowledge of the matter, she believed the publicly revealed amounts Pfizer disclosed "seemed low."
She added:
In 2011 Pfizer agreed to pay $14.5 million to resolve False Claims Act accusations that it illegally marketed its bladder drug Detrol.
In 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 had bribed overseas doctors and other healthcare professionals.
The SEC alleged that,
According to Kara Brockmeyer, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit,
In 2012, Pfizer was hit with another massive fine - this time to settle claims that the side effects of its Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) drug Prempro cause breast cancer.
Around 10,000 women filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging that the drug maker withheld information about the potential risks of breast cancer from HRTs.
The $1.2 billion settlement came after six years of trials.
In 2013, Pfizer agreed to a $288 million settlement for claims by 2,700 people that its smoking-cessation drug Chantix caused suicidal thoughts and severe psychological disorders.
The FDA had placed a black box warning on Chantix, the highest safety-related warning assigned by the FDA,
Pharmaceutical companies make every effort to circumvent black box warnings.
They generate bad publicity and negatively impact the marketability of the drug in question, which leads to adverse financial consequences for the company.
In 2016, after years of lobbying, Pfizer managed to get the FDA to lift the black box designation from Chantrix in a 10-9 vote, giving the controversial blockbuster drug a "new lease on life."
In 2013 Pfizer reached a $35 million settlement relating to the alleged improper marketing and promotion of the immunosuppressive drug Rapamune.
When New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced that he and 40 other state attorneys general had arrived at the settlement, he remarked,
While this article's list of Pfizer's corporate crimes is prodigious by any measure of shady business practices, it is far from exhaustive.
In total, since 2000 Pfizer has accumulated $10,945,838,549 in penalties and incurred 96 violations covering a wide range of offenses.
A Company You Can Trust?
Pfizer's portfolio of corporate crimes rivals that of the most corrupt companies in history.
But that did not stop Pfizer from becoming a corporate celebrity with its COVID-19 vaccine. Indeed, the company has benefited handsomely from that product, whose $36.8 billion in 2021 sales made it the highest-selling pharmaceutical product in history.
When the pharma company's 2022 revenues reached an all-time, single-year high of $100.3 billion, COVID-19 vaccine sales accounted for nearly 38 percent of those revenues.
Yet, while Pfizer was basking in the glow of mainstream media cheerleading and record-setting profits, honest inquiries into its unremitting record of corruption were kept from public view.
We were told we must "Trust in Pfizer" to vaccinate the world and save humanity from the so-called 'COVID crisis'...
Given Pfizer's documented record of misdeeds, any reasonable person would ask:
In a June 12, 2008, ceremony, at the original Pfizer manufacturing site in Brooklyn, New York, the American Chemical Society designated Pfizer's development of deep-tank fermentation as a National Historic Chemical Landmark.
At that commemoration, then-president of Pfizer Global Manufacturing Natale Ricciardi told attendees,
Despite cryptically lamenting,
All these years later - and despite Mr. Ricciardi's insistence on Pfizer's magnanimity - a thinking person might look through the company's checkered catalog of crimes and fines and recognize that noble experiments are hardly the realm of "alleged" serial felons like Pfizer...
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