Big Pharma company Pfizer has repeatedly engaged in inhumane and illegal activities in its history, including acts of fraud, corruption ...
Big Pharma company Pfizer has repeatedly engaged in inhumane and illegal activities in its history, including acts of fraud, corruption and even human experimentation disguised as vaccine trials.
An investigative journalist writing about censored subjects under the pseudonym “Kanekoa the Great” noted on his Substack blog that one of the greatest cultural transformations to occur in the past nearly three years is the complete rehabilitation of the image of Big Pharma companies and their newfound glorification for supposedly being responsible for saving humanity from the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
“An industry plagued by decades of fraud, corruption and criminality managed to quickly rebrand itself as the savior of humanity during the COVID-19 crisis. But nothing inherently changed. Big Pharma still values shareholders’ profits more than people’s lives,” Kanekoa the Great wrote.
For evidence of Pfizer’s history of engaging in illegal activity that leads to the deaths of hundreds, Kanekoa the Great said to look no further than Nigeria.
In the northern Nigerian city of Kano, Pfizer in 1996 administered an experimental drug to 200 children whose parents never knew that their kids were subjected to a clinical trial. Pfizer did not obtain consent or inform any of the children or their parents that they were the subjects of an experiment. The pharma company did not even inform the recipients that the drug has not been approved for wider use.
Eleven of the children died. Dozens more of the children suffered severe adverse effects, including brain damage and organ failure.
As a result of criminal and civil suits, Pfizer agreed to pay $75 million to the families harmed. Now, Kano’s residents are reasonably hesitant of any vaccinations.
“I won’t advise, I won’t allow and I won’t tolerate seeing my son, myself or any of my relatives to receive the COVID-19 vaccine,” said Hajiya Maryam, a resident of Kano whose son was one of the victims of Pfizer’s illegal experiment. Maryam has already dedicated her life to discouraging anybody she knows in Kano from taking the vaccine and informing them of the 1996 incident.
“I will educate them on that,” she said. “My son is now living in agony despite the so-called compensation… He is neither in school nor into business. He is living a miserable life.”
Pfizer paying out hundreds of millions to settle lawsuits against illicit activities
The Kano incident is not the only time Pfizer has had to shell out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits.
In 1992, Pfizer paid an undisclosed sum of between $165 to $215 million after artificial heart valves that it developed kept fracturing, leading to nearly 300 deaths at the time. In 1994, Pfizer paid $20 million after it lied to the federal government to get approval for another mechanical heart valve that kept fracturing. Nearly half of the money went to monitor the health of patients who received the device or to pay for its removal.
In 2002, Pfizer paid $49 million for defrauding the federal government and 40 states by charging too much for its cholesterol drug. In 2004, Pfizer pleaded guilty to two felonies and paid $430 million in penalties for fraudulently promoting the drug Neurontin for unapproved uses.
In 2009, Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion, then the largest pharmaceutical fraud settlement, for misbranding the painkiller Bextra “with the intent to defraud or mislead.” In the same year, Pfizer paid another $750 million to settle a class action suit accusing its drug Rezulin of killing 63 people and causing dozens more to experience liver failure.
From 2010 to 2014 alone, Pfizer paid out another $1.72 billion to settle lawsuits related to its illicit activities and its ineffective drugs.
As Kanekoa the Great noted, the above-mentioned list of incidents are just a handful of the scandals involving Pfizer. The result of these malpractices means it continues to conduct unethical human testing of its products in the world’s poorest nations.
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