Despite repeated DOJ findings of corrupt marketing by some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical giants, major drug companies continue to circumvent responsibility for much of their wrongdoing and to enjoy great public trust.
The rap sheets for some of the wealthiest drug companies go back many years, as will be seen below. Yet the billions of dollars they have been forced to pay out in penalties for their misconduct are dwarfed by lucrative profits rolling into the companies’ coffers from ill-gotten gains.
Despite the public disgrace in being repeatedly caught breaking the law, the drug manufacturers have continued to prosper. As witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic—they have even managed to reinvent themselves as humanity’s ‘saviors.’
A History Stained with Alleged Criminal Neglect
Pfizer CEO Albert Boula claimed during a recent interview that a group of medical professionals intentionally circulating “misinformation” critical of the Pfizer mRNA shot were “criminal.”
The Pfizer CEO must have forgotten the history of his own company. That landscape is stained with tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging criminal neglect and intentional wrongdoing, in marketing dangerous drugs and failing to alert consumers to their life-threatening risks.
Since 2002, the company and its subsidiaries have been assessed $3 billion in criminal convictions, civil penalties and jury awards, writes the Corporate Research Project. These payments were granted as compensation for medical injuries, for false claims by the company, and for hiding research that could hurt its marketing initiatives.
Other payments were penalties for bribing doctors and medical corporations to prescribe and promote Pfizer-manufactured drugs.
Some of the most publicized of these cases were settled in 2001, 2002, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2017, as described below.
But the shame and monetary price of having its crimes exposed have not deterred the drug giant. It’s as though the penalties and payouts are all part of the acceptable cost of “doing business.”
‘Children Were Used as Human Guinea Pigs’
In 1996, Pfizer gave the experimental drug Trovan to 200 Nigerian children ill with meningitis, without informing their parents that an approved cure already existed, or that their children were subjects of a medical experiment.
Eleven children died. Many others suffered brain damage, organ failure, or paralysis.
A Washington Post investigation reported that one 10-year-old girl suffering from meningitis was not taken off experimental Trovan and given the alternative proven treatment by Pfizer’s trial managers — even when it was clear that her condition was deteriorating. One of her eyes froze. She lost strength and then died.