How Pfizer exploited the pandemic to pillage the American taxpayer by selling the U.S. government a COVID-19 drug that did not work

And how top public health officials helped Pfizer do it

Ashish Jha, White House COVID-19 response coordinator, who publicly twisted the Paxlovid data and, at taxpayer expense and with no patient benefit, made Pfizer tens of billions of dollars

The U.S. government paid Pfizer nearly $20,000,000,000 for 25 million courses of treatment with Paxlovid over the course of the pandemic [1].

At 160 million individual taxpayers per year, that amounts to a wealth transfer of $125 from each and every taxpayer to Pfizer.

That might be OK if Paxlovid actually worked for COVID-19, right?

Cue a newly published randomized controlled trial, completed by Pfizer two years ago but left unpublished until now: Paxlovid does not help with COVID-19 after all [2].

This trial was conducted during 2021 and early 2022, when the pandemic was still at its height.

The study found:

If a person is unvaccinated but at standard risk for severe disease, Paxlovid does not help.

If a person is vaccinated but at high risk for standard disease, Paxlovid does not help.

This leaves only very high-risk unvaccinated people, a relatively rare subpopulation for whom only a small proportion of Paxlovid was ever used.

During the time this trial was underway, only 15.2% of American adults were unvaccinated [3], and still fewer than that were also high-risk.

In fact, some populations to which Paxlovid was given, such as adolescents, experienced worse outcomes [4]. That's right, Paxlovid may have harmed young people and have been inappropirate to give to them.

It gets worse: Paxlovid was almost universally administered to patients throughout the pandemic at the recommendation of public health officials at the very highest levels. And these officials knew better. But they did it anyway.

Take Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator and current dean of public health at Brown University. On October 15, 2022, he said the following in a press conference [5]:

"We know from large-scale studies that if you’re up to date on your vaccines and then if you have a breakthrough infection and you take Paxlovid, mortality really does start approaching zero. Like, we have seen in very large cohorts of patients who have gotten COVID that everybody who’s up to date and then, if they have a breakthrough infection, gets Paxlovid, like, mortality numbers are just exceedingly low, to a point where they probably are very, very close to zero."

In the same press conference, he also said:

"If you’re a 52-year-old who’s up to date on your vaccines, your benefit is going to be small.  But the cost of taking it, meaning the side effects, are also trivial.  If you’re 75, the benefits are going to be large. And so, I believe everybody is better off taking it, but the benefit is bigger for people who are higher risk."

But, as we have seen, none of this is true.

If you're vaccinated, there is no benefit to Paxlovid, no matter what age. If you're over 75 and vaccinated, there is also no benefit. The only benefit that exists is if you are at high risk but are not vaccinated. As for his claim that "everyone is better off taking it", there is no evidence for this at all.

Jha was lying. As he misreported the findings from the studies, he fidgeted with his ring on his finger. And when he was done answering, he tensely pursed his lips and looked around.

He was anxious, because he knew what he was saying was not true.

Yet, at the behest of officials like Jha, billions of dollars in taxpayer money was drained from the coffers of the American government for almost nobody's benefit. This amounts to a wealth transfer of $20,000,000,000 from American taxpayers to Pfizer.

Almost nobody benefited. Except Pfizer.

This followed the same playbook as the vaccine. Although the vaccine almost certainly benefitted some subpopulations (the elderly and otherwise at-risk), universal recommendations were tenuous extrapolations from data in these populations to other populations, which likely led to harm [6].

But these officials achieved one thing in particular: record earnings for Pfizer in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Without poorly evidenced recommendations lacking scientific nuance, these profits wouild never have been possible.

But thanks to physicians like Dr. Jha, they were.

One might ask: "but how were trustworthy and reliable physicians like Dr. Jha supposed to know such a thing?"

Two ways:

1. A core tenet of evidence-based medicine: without strong evidence supporting their benefit, i.e. until proven otherwise, historically [6, 7], most medical interventions are useless or harmful;

2. The Pfizer data were already available at the time Dr. Jha was making his false claims, and Dr. Jha was aware of them.

Record scratch.

Wait a second.

"Did Kevin just say that the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator lied to the American people--knowing at the time that his statements were false--to push a drug that did nothing but cost the taxpayers billions of dollars?"

Indeed.

You see, the recent study was completed in July 2022 [8] and only just recently published. The press release showing that it did not meet its primary endpoint was published in June 2022 [9].

As with vaccines, the authorities knew that Paxlovid provided no benefit to anyone except for the most at risk.

When Dr. Jha got up to sing the praises of universal vaccination and universal treatment, he was singing the praises of Pfizer. He was doing a marketing campaign from the podium of the White House.

After his position at the White House was terminated, for his service Dr. Jha was bestowed the position dean of public health at Brown University [10].

The academic-pharmaceutical-industrial complex honors the services of those loyal to it--integrity be damned.

References

[1] https://reuters.com/world/us/us-pay-pfizer-nearly-2-bln-more-paxlovid-courses-2023-2022-12-13/
[2] https://nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2309003
[3] https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9943697
[4] https://medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/idweek/106823
[5] https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/10/25/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-covid-19-response-coordinator-dr-ashish-jha-6/
[6] https://jme.bmj.com/content/50/2/126
[7] https://twitter.com/kevinnbass/status/1744137090634240282
[8] https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05011513#study-record-dates
[9] https://pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-reports-additional-data-paxlovidtm-supporting
[10] https://dean.sph.brown.edu/dean