Drugs giant Pfizer has been fined a paltry £34,800 for marketing its Covid jab before it had been licensed. The fine represents just 0.00005% of Pfizer’s 2021 revenues, which mainly came from the experimental mRNA vaccine.
The UK’s Prescription Medicine Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) imposed the fine and accused Pfizer of “bringing discredit” on the pharmaceutical industry after senior executives had posted on social media about the effectiveness of the vaccine, even though it had not been licensed at the time.
Pfizer had “misused social media to misleadingly and illegally promote their Covid vaccine,” the ruling read, and the behaviour was “even more widespread” than the PMCPA had thought, and it went to the top of the UK operation.
Pfizer UK’s medical director Dr Berkeley Phillips had posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “our vaccine candidate is 95 percent effective in preventing Covid-19, and 94 percent effective in people over 65 years old.”
The company has been reprimanded six times for wrongful marketing of its vaccine.
Nonetheless, it was a strategy that worked. Its revenues soared to $81.3 billion in 2021, up from $41.7 billion in 2020, mainly because of the Covid jab.
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