Opinion: The Covid vaccine can’t absolve big pharma of all its sins

In the last couple of weeks alone, we’ve seen Purdue Pharma plead guilty to criminal charges in connection with their opioid drug oxycontin. Purdue admitted to conspiring to defraud US officials and offering illegal kickbacks to doctors and an electronic healthcare records vendor. All to keep the prescriptions churning, while Americans died and poor communities withered under the opioid epidemic. Meanwhile, most of the billions of dollars Purdue owes in penalties will remain unpaid.

And the much-lauded Covid vaccine developer, Pfizer? It was barely a decade ago in 2009 that Pfizer and its subsidiary Pharmacia & Upjohn agreed to pay $2.3 billion in a criminal fraud settlement with the US Department of Justice for the illegal promotion of its drug Bextra, that was discontinued in 2005 due to safety concerns. At the time, this was the biggest healthcare fraud settlement in the DOJ’s history, because Pfizer, as the DOJ noted, “promoted the sale of Bextra for several uses and dosages that the FDA specifically declined to approve due to safety concerns.” This is from the US Department of Justice; not blahblahnaturalremediesdiscoverthetruth.org.