Texas AG appeals dismissal of lawsuit against Pfizer
District Judge Sam Cummings has dismissed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit against Pfizer, explaining that the pharmaceutical company is protected from such lawsuits under the terms of the PREP (Public Readiness and Emergency) Act. A similar suit brought by the Attorney General of Kansas, Kris Kobach, is widely expected to be dismissed on the same grounds.
Both Paxton and Kobach singled out Pfizer for attack, even though other pharma companies also developed dangerous COVID shots injected into the arms of millions.
Texas v. Pfizer
Just over a year has passed since Paxton filed his lawsuit against Pfizer, accusing the company of misrepresenting the efficacy of its mRNA COVID shots by citing the relative risk reduction (95 percent) without mentioning that the actual or absolute risk reduction was just 0.85 percent. In other words, in order to prevent one symptomatic case of COVID-19, 119 people would have to be injected.
But the shots were even less effective than those figures suggested, Paxton’s suit contended. They actually make people more susceptible to COVID infection:
COVID-19 cases increased after widespread vaccine administration, and some areas saw a greater percentage of deaths from COVID-19 among the vaccinated population than the unvaccinated.
Multiple studies have confirmed this observation.
The Texas lawsuit also accused Pfizer of applying pressure on those who criticized the shots. Given that mainstream media largely fell in with the official narrative without demur, this pressure was mainly directed at the owners of social media sites:
How did Pfizer respond when it became apparent that its vaccine was failing and the viability of its cash cow was threatened? By intimidating those spreading the truth, and by conspiring to censor its critics.
Pfizer labeled as “criminals” those who spread facts about the vaccine. It accused them of spreading “misinformation.” And it coerced social media platforms to silence prominent truth-tellers.
Dead on arrival?
In its filing of dismissal, the Court made no reference to the content of the suit, stating:
After careful consideration of the arguments, applicable law, and circumstances presented, the Court finds that the Motion to Dismiss is GRANTED.
More specifically, the Court finds that as a matter of law under the circumstances of this case, the Defendant is entitled to immunity under the Public Readiness and Emergency Act (“PREP Act”). Moreover, both the PREP Act and the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (“FDCA”) preempts [sic.] Plaintiff’s claims. Finally, the Court finds that the alleged statements by Defendant were not connected to any “trade or commerce” or any “consumer transaction.”
The judge thus determined that Pfizer is protected under the terms of the PREP Act and the shots are not consumer products in law.
The decision noted that Pfizer had requested of the Court that it take the then-prevailing situation into account in its ruling — the rush to manufacture a vaccine and the “national emergency.” The Court complied:
Defendant asks the Court to take judicial notice of the circumstances related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Operation Warp Speed, and national emergency that was declared in relation to the pandemic. The Court takes judicial notice of these facts and circumstances.
Kansas v. Pfizer
The Texas lawsuit was relatively restrained in its content, referring only to Pfizer’s alleged misrepresentation of the nature of the shots and concealment of trial data. The lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Kansas, Kris Kobach, is broader, highlighting the dangers of the shots as well as alleging that Pfizer marketed its shots as safe while knowing of the associated health risks:
Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine was safe even though it knew its COVID-19 vaccine was connected to serious adverse events, including myocarditis and pericarditis, failed pregnancies, and deaths.
Based on the results of its clinical trials as well as post-marketing studies, Pfizer, the state claims, did know that its shots correlated in some way to serious adverse events.
Kobach stressed in his suit that more people in Kansas received the Pfizer shots than other shots.
... Pfizer administered 3,355,518 Pfizer vaccine doses in Kansas as of February 7, 2024. This accounted for more than 60% of all vaccine doses in Kansas.
Pfizer guilty of acting like a pharma company
Kobach also singled out Pfizer for “concealing critical safety information from the public”:
Pfizer did not publicly release adverse events data from its database...
When Pfizer announced that the FDA had authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, Pfizer did not disclose that its trial included only healthy individuals and excluded unhealthy individuals...
He also accused Pfizer of conducting its clinical trials in such a way that there could be no long-term comparisons made between the health of the injected and the non-injected:
Because Pfizer unblinded the original control group and allowed them to receive Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer, government regulators, and independent scientists cannot fully compare the safety and efficacy of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine against unvaccinated individuals...
And he claimed that this was a basic modus operandi of Pfizer:
Pfizer’s extensive and aggressive efforts to keep its COVID-19 vaccine information hidden conflict with its public transparency pledges and raise serious questions about what Pfizer is hiding and why it is hiding it.
In part due to all these “misrepresentations,” Kobach alleged, Pfizer accrued “record company revenue” of around $75 billion in just two years.
Meanwhile, the other participants in Operation Warp Speed...
Many of the accusations in the Texas and Kansas legal acgtions appear to apply equally to Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Janssen. When one compares the VAERS reports of adverse events following the shots, the number linked to Pfizer is the same as the number reported following Moderna’s shots: 42. Given that many more people got Pfizer’s brew in their arms, this makes Moderna’s version proportionally more dangerous. In fact, this applies not only in Kansas but also nationwide when one compares VAERS data.
What Kobach has said, when questioned by journalists on why he omitted to include Moderna and other vaccine manufacturers from his suit, is that Pfizer was “not part of Operation Warp Speed (OWS)” and therefore was not subject to government supervision.
Pfizer was, however, part of OWS from the very beginning, as the following image from an OWS PowerPoint slide shows. The slide was used at an FDA meeting held in October 2020.
Pfizer’s COVID shot contract with the Department of Defense was worth around $10 billion. The terms of the contract clariy that Pfizer was part of OWS, as do numerous press releases from OWS over the months.
If only the government had been in charge...
The second part of Kobach’s response suggests that Pfizer’s trial data were kept hidden from the government which did not have access to it. While it is true that Pfizer, unlike Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Janssen, had its own data safety monitoring board (DSMB) during clinical trials, the government acceded to this demand. And it appears that much of the trial data was not hidden from the government.
In fact, many OWS reports praise Pfizer for prompt provision of trial data, and there appears to be no record of any government official accusing the company of hiding data from the government. One may assume that Kobach would have presented any such record as evidence, had it been available to him.
Additionally, Pfizer’s conduct in this regard — insisting on conducting its own clinical trials rather than outsourcing the job to the government — may be entirely standard in the pharmaceutical industry. The usual, almost uniform practice is for a drug company to run its own clinical trials, finance those same trials, analyze the data from the trials, and only then present that analysis to the government (i.e., the FDA).
With Operation Warp Speed, this usual method of doing things was dramatically altered. A single, unified DSMB was established (headed by Dr. Richard Whitley, a Fauci appointee), which was controlled by the NIH and BARDA (i.e., the federal government).
Notice the footnote where Pfizer is presented as an outlier.
Whose vaccines? Whose profit?
Looking at the OWS contract with Moderna, one sees that the federal government undertook to pay for all its clinical trials. Furthermore, its animal studies as well as the Phase 1 human clinical trials were performed by the Vaccine Research Center at the NIH. The investment may have paid off for the NIH as it resulted in co-ownership of Moderna’s COVID shots and therefore a share of the profits.
This raises a potential conflict of interest as the government body funding the research into a new product, is responsible for deciding whether to license that product, and then may profit from that product while mandating use of that product.
It is not immediately obvious why Pfizer chose to keep its clinical trials under its own control rather than opting to come under the government’s protective umbrella as its competitors did. In his lawsuit, Kobach accused Pfizer of maintaining its own adverse events database, separate from the government VAERS database, which contained adverse events that were,
... reported spontaneously to Pfizer, cases reported by the health authorities, cases published in the medical literature, cases from Pfizer-sponsored marketing programs, non-interventional studies, and cases of serious AEs reported from clinical studies regardless of causality assessment.
The government does, however, have access to all this data.
Pharma should be just as transparent as the government...
In the end, direct government supervision within the OWS framework may not have resulted in a safer end product in any case. As we have seen above, this was demonstrably not the case with Moderna, whose shots are statistically more dangerous than those produced by Pfizer.
And while the government had access to all the data, it did not make those data publicly available other than in the few cases in which it was forced to by private citizens filing repeated Freedom of Information Act requests.
In fact, the government did not even make the clinical trial data from the COVID shots freely available to the pharma companies which signed up for full government supervision. When Janssen wanted to access its own trial data, it had to file a FOIA request to obtain it.
Regardless of the benefit of government involvement, or lack thereof, the above differences in the Pfizer research structure, compared with other COVID vaccine makers, may provide a path to victory for the plaintiff states, if the dismissal is overruled. Texas has already begun the appeal process:
“Pfizer repeatedly and knowingly misrepresented the effectiveness and safety of their COVID-19 vaccine and pressured Americans to take the shot without full knowledge of the risks,” said Attorney General Paxton. “When consumers questioned the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine, Pfizer sought to silence them—prioritizing profits over the truth. I will not stop until Pfizer is held accountable for deceptively pushing its COVID-19 vaccine on consumers.”
Plan B?
Paxton or Kobach might, instead, have filed criminal suits against not only Pfizer but also Moderna and the other companies involved in Operation Warp Speed. The PREP Act protects the pharma companies against civil lawsuits such as those filed by Kansas and Texas, but not against criminal suits. Private citizens may not bring a criminal case against the companies, but Attorneys General may.
The information contained in this article is for educational and information purposes only and is not intended as health, medical, financial or legal advice. Always consult a physician, lawyer or other qualified professional regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition, health objectives or legal or financial issues.
