Pfizer remains for many synonymous with the vaccine against Covid-19, since it is the laboratory which discovered, with BioNTech, the first vaccine marketed in Europe. A scientific feat, at the time hailed by all, and which has since largely contributed to the record turnover of 100 billion dollars (91 billion euros) that this American juggernaut of pharmaceutical laboratories announced for 2022. So the time for reckoning has come.
In Brussels, MEPs summoned the heads of Big Pharma in October 2022 to, among other things, ask them how the contracts had been negotiated and obtain clarifications on mysterious SMS which would have been exchanged between the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. But he never came. This absence serves as a starting point for the "Complementary investigation" broadcast Thursday, May 4, after being deprogrammed Thursday, April 6.
End-of-the-world music and heavy staging… The investigations begin in Brussels. The European Union is Pfizer's biggest market, with 2.4 billion doses, and these have seen their price increase from 15.50 euros to 19.50 euros. Pursued in the corridors, Ms. von der Leyen politely refuses to speak. "It is said that at the G20 the president of Pfizer was received as a head of state", declares, on the other hand, Nathalie Coutinet, teacher-researcher at the Sorbonne-Paris-Nord.
Illegal clinical trials
The relaxing parenthesis is provided by the epic story, in Sandwich, in the United Kingdom, of Peter Ellis, biologist, and David Brown, chemist, the two researchers who discovered the virtues of Viagra by chance, by testing it on former miners: "We gave them a pill, they spent the night in the clinic under observation and had to report any side effects to us. Launched in late 1998, Viagra brings in $1 billion a year to Pfizer.
The journalists also found in Dakar (Senegal) a doctor present in Nigeria in 1996 at the time of an epidemic of meningitis. He recounts having seen Pfizer researchers administer – to a hundred children – an antibiotic without marketing authorization. Accused of illegal clinical trials, Pfizer paid $75 million in compensation.
"The profit was more important than the health of the patient," said John Kopchinski, the former employee behind the biggest penalty ever imposed on Pfizer. A large sequence is devoted to this affair: in 2002, it was he who accused his employer of having pushed doctors to overdose a painkiller, Bextra, at the risk of causing strokes. Pfizer paid $2.3 billion, including $67 million for the whistleblower. "It's the rule in the United States," the voiceover soberly concludes.
