A news article from 2023 was brought to my attention today. It described a whistleblower lawsuit against Pfizer. This article…
…can be found at this link. It deals with payments made by Pfizer spanning the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic and leading up to the global rollout of their modified RNA shots. It alleges that Pfizer committed fraud related to “Foreign Corrupt Practices“.
When I read the article, I found two details in the story to be particularly disconcerting.
First, I learned a new term. Apparently there are “potentially influential government officials (PIGOs)” that pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer target monetarily. This term bothers me and the purpose of the payouts seems to be at odds with conflict of interest policies that are supposed to be enforced in countries like Canada.
Second, alongside China, Pfizer targeted Canada’s PIGOs through a disproportionately large budget. The story focused on the fact that Pfizer may have committed fraud by targeting potentially influential government officials in China with a disproportionately large sum of money (“over ten times the amount of money”) compared to what was paid out to government officials in the United States. However, as a Canadian, I found the following facts to be of concern:
“Specifically, Pfizer spent $168 million on PIGOs in China between the second quarter of 2019 and the third quarter of 2021, Han’s work found. That compared to $12 million in the U.S., $11 million in Canada, $7.5 million in Russia and $7.1 million in the U.K.”
The $11 million paid by Pfizer to Canadian PIGOs is concerning because it almost equals that allocated to influencing the U.S.A., but our economic footprint is about 12-times smaller and our pharmaceutical market is approximately 18-time smaller. This means that Pfizer’s budget devoted to targeting government officials in Canada was, like the one targeting Chinese officials, disproportionately large after adjusting for the size of the pharmaceutical market within each country.
