When Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, agreed to be interviewed by the BBC in December 2021, he probably saw it as an opportunity for a bit of free advertising and PR for his company and its Covid vaccine. And so it turned out, apparently. An undemanding set of questions from the docile Fergus Walsh gave Dr. Bourla the chance to opine unchallenged on all things Covid and Covid vaccination, and no doubt communicate a few of his company’s key marketing messages.
However, UsforThem, an organisation which campaigns for the needs and rights of children, saw things differently. Its researchers noticed that during his interview Dr. Bourla had made statements about Covid and the use of Covid vaccines in children that were misleading, unbalanced and not capable of substantiation. They took these concerns to the U.K. regulatory body, the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (the PMCPA), and a recent article in the Telegraph reports that the PMCPA agreed with them.
It is scandalous that it took the PMCPA a year to deal with this case. Meanwhile, Bourla and his colleagues have continued to make vast profits on the back of their COVID-19 vaccines, aided no doubt by these misleading statements. The PMCPA is the U.K. pharmaceutical industry’s very own ‘self-regulatory’ body. Self-regulation is a valuable privilege delegated to this industry by the MHRA, whose statutory responsibility it is to ensure that everyone, not just the pharmaceutical industry, complies with the laws which regulate the promotion of medicines. Failure to comply can, but very rarely does, result in criminal charges.
Those of you shocked by the revelation that the MHRA is 86% funded by the pharmaceutical industry, prepare yourselves: because the PMCPA is 100% funded by the pharmaceutical industry. It also reports to the board of its industry body, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (the ABPI). This Board is mostly comprised of senior management of U.K. pharmaceutical companies. In fact, at the time this complaint about Pfizer was made, the President of the ABPI Board was also head of Pfizer in the U.K., and the current ABPI Vice-President is the Pfizer U.K. Country President. The PMCPA actually describes itself as “a division of the ABPI”. So, no potential conflicts of interest there then.
Thus, UsforThem will probably have achieved this significant judgment in the teeth of determined opposition. The PMCPA’s own records demonstrate that it is not uncommon for complainants, as in this case, to wait a year or even longer for a final decision. Prevarication, inefficiency and delay appear to have been weaponised by the pharmaceutical industry over the past few years to enable complaints about misbehaviour to be kicked down the road far enough for the impacts of any resulting adverse judgments to be diluted and to allow sales and profits from misleading advertising and unethical promotion to be maximised.
And now that Bourla and Pfizer have eventually been found guilty of misleading the U.K. public about their Covid vaccine, what penalties or sanctions are they facing? Well, fortunately for them, nothing too serious: it is not possible to know exactly the extent of their offences, as the report of this case has not yet been published. However, the breaches of which they have apparently been found guilty – misleading the public, making unsubstantiated claims and failing to present information in a balanced way – could conceivably be covered by just three clauses of their industry’s Code of Practice. The current level of fine (or as the PMCPA prefers to call it ‘administrative charge’) for a single breach of one clause currently stands at £3,500 (or £12,000 if the breach is upheld at appeal). So, for this particular case, three individual clause breaches could mean that Pfizer is now facing a bill for a sum as little as £36,000. Had it not decided to appeal, that bill might only have been as low as £10,500. When viewed alongside the eye-watering profits Pfizer stands to make from its Covid vaccines, and no doubt the resulting generous bonuses banked by Bourla (even when just considered over the 12 months it has taken for the PMCPA to arrive at a decision for this case), these ‘penalties’ are of course derisory, both as punishments and also disincentives to similar behaviour in the future.
The failure of penalties meted out by the PMCPA to incentivise better behaviour is clearly demonstrated by the fact that over the past three years the PMCPA has judged Pfizer to have misled the public about its COVID-19 vaccines on no fewer than four previous occasions – including three occasions on which it was judged to have “failed to maintain high standards” and two occasions on which it was additionally judged to have “brought discredit on the pharmaceutical industry”. And it’s not just Pfizer who has been caught out misbehaving in this way. AstraZeneca too has been found guilty by the PMCPA of misleading the public about the safety and efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine. It is clear that these penalties not only fail to encourage companies to learn from their own errors, but from the errors of others too.
These days it must surely appear to many people that the entire regulatory system for oversight of pharmaceutical industry activities in the U.K. is slipping out of democratic control and that as a result it is failing to act in their interests. This has become more evident over the past three years, during which concerns have been raised about the rushed approvals of the Covid vaccines without adequate scrutiny and transparency. Similar concerns have also been raised about the post-marketing safety surveillance of these vaccines. To this list must surely now be added worries about how the behaviour of the pharmaceutical industry is regulated when it comes to its communication and interactions with the general public, clinicians, politicians, the media and journalists.
In order to restore public confidence in our entire pharmaceutical regulatory system, I believe that there are now three things which need to done.
First, the era of self-regulation of the U.K. pharmaceutical industry by the PMCPA and the ABPI must come to an end. It is now time that pharmaceutical companies were no longer allowed to mark their own homework. Inefficiency and delay can no longer be allowed to be used as a shield for malpractice. A new, properly resourced and truly independent body is needed to carry out this role. Such a body could possibly be financed at arms length by the MHRA from a levy on U.K. pharma companies based on, for example, their annual U.K. turnover. There are those who say that the MHRA should actually take this role back for itself. However, there is now such a level of concern and suspicion amongst the public about the competence, transparency and independence of the MHRA that I believe that trust can only be rebuilt by the establishment of a completely new system of oversight.
In addition, the penalties and sanctions resulting from breaches of the regulations must be made more severe. The current derisory ‘administrative charges’ can in no way act as satisfactory punishments for serious breaches of the regulations, particularly those which represent egregious betrayals of public trust. Neither do they currently act as any kind of disincentive for any future similar misbehaviour.
Secondly, a public inquiry is needed to investigate the process which the MHRA has used, and continues to use, for approving COVID-19 vaccines. This should consider all aspects of the approval process, including how approval was expedited using Regulation 174 and Conditional Marketing Authorisations, the drivers for expedition, approval of line-extensions, age-stratification of approvals and any potential conflicts of interest. There is currently a petition asking the Government to launch such an inquiry which can be found and signed here. At the time of writing the number of signatories stands at just over 13,300.
Thirdly, the last time there was any parliamentary scrutiny of activities of the pharmaceutical industry in the U.K. was a select committee investigation which reported in 2005. That report made a number of important observations and recommendations, some of which were implemented, many of which were not. Almost two decades later the world has changed a great deal and it is now again time for a parliamentary select committee to take another look at this issue – particularly in the light of the recent national response to COVID-19.
I will leave the final word to those parliamentarians of 2005, whose concerns seem possibly even more relevant today than they did then:
Our overarching conclusion is that the U.K. pharmaceutical industry is in many ways outstanding: it conducts excellent research, produces products which make a vital contribution to the health of the nation and is of great economic importance; however for want of critical scrutiny by, and lack of deference and accountability to, the public and public bodies, the industry lacks the discipline and quality control that it needs but cannot itself provide.
Dr. Alan Black is a retired pharmaceutical physician, having worked in and for the pharmaceutical industry for around 30 years. Prior to that he spent a number of years in laboratory and clinical medicine.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Professor Stephen Belcher, the Met Office Chief Scientist, recently said, “The latest planetary health check tells us that earth is profoundly ill.”
Decades of being on the receiving end of claptrap is getting deeply personal now.
Belcher of the Myth Office – Belcher by name, Belcher by nature.
Another state-funded windbag. Defund the Myth Office and start afresh.
It does seem that the governing classes are not particularly worried about child exploitation, they stood by when the young Greta was being exploited, they did nothing when rape gangs were exploiting children.
The ills of the planet are caused by political zealotry and the young are being exploited yet again. I suppose they will want them to go to war very soon. It’s not the climate that’s the problem it’s the politicians.
How could he say anything else and keep his job?
I was reading a very bad book by John Mortimer the other day (don’t ask), published in 1990, and in it he skips forward 10 years to describe the village where it’s set, and gives a description of how the world has changed: melted icecaps, areas of coastline vanished, polar bears drowned etc. in fact all the garbage we’ve been pumped with that has not happened in 35 years, but idiots keep believing will.
Millenia of advancing civilisation and we might as well all be Druids.
Scientifically and mathematically, most people have a similar level of attainment as a Druid. And that includes 99% of our politicians
You can take water to a horse but you can’t make it think.
More than true – nowadays people mock the mediaevals in the mistaken belief they thought the world was flat. In fact the average undergraduate in mediaeval times would not only know it was round, but how they could easily prove it. How many of us would know how to do that?
How would one go about proving that, just out of interest?
Without computer modelling this wouldn’t be happening.
It is computer modelling in the hands of inept politicians which is ‘climate & economic catastrophe’
Bring on rising carbon dioxide levels. The world thrives on it
“temperature in 2024 reached 1.6°C above the pre-industrial level (estimated 1850-1900) – if measurements are accurate”
A simple question, how do we know that this wouldn’t have happened anyway?
Temps have rose and dropped many times before we were even on the planet!
Notice the statement at the far right (no pun intended) of the graph: Start of data 1855…. just when temps were following the past dips and troughs!
There’s something else to notice about this: The difference between the labelled low and high points is just 4⁰C. Which means that temperatures are essentially flatlining and the illusion of something else is created by using a scale which makes no sense wrt human perception of temperature which is roughly every +/-5⁰C make a noticable difference.
Yes – the sense is very different if it’s expressed as “temperatures in 2024 reached 1.6C above Little Ice Age levels.” Yes of course, and…???
Ah the dreaded Null Hypothesis!
Dreaded by the zealots.
“Globally each of the past ten years were individually the ten warmest years on record.”
Can anyone extract what he was trying to say with this statement?
I notice from the MET Office dashboard that hours of sunshine have increased markedly in the UK over the past century. Is that a good or bad thing? And, how much does more sun hitting the earth raise temperature?
How can that be?
We orbit the earth just as we’ve always done, from approximately the same distance and with no change in the duration of orbit. The axis tilt is approx 23°, so the amount of sunlight hitting the planet per season will be largely consistent. Day length is also consistent, with sunrise and sunset also unchanged.
I wonder how they measure it?
They are referring to cloud cover. Goodness knows how accurate the measurement of that was before satellites
And PS the earth’s orbit of the sun is complex and subject to fluctuation, but that’s not what the article is referring to
Thanks for clarifying. I did say approximately.
If historical cloud cover measures go back one century then I’d be willing to bet they’re a product of modelling.
I suspect satellite measurements could achieve this, but I also guess that the early satellites wouldn’t have had the necessary sophistication for precise estimates, so the trend would likely be patchy.
It’s hours of sunshine by month, season & annual. Data goes back to 1910.
I assume it’s due in part in reduced soot & smog from domestic coal fires & the closing down of factories.
It’s very marked. It would be deliciously ironic if by ending fossil fuels we allow through more sunshine & hence warm the planet!
I was thinking there could be a smog effect as well – compared to earlier last century, the air is much cleaner now than it was. You’ve only got to look at old buildings post cleaning to see the difference
The definition of “sunshine hours” is the key here. There needs to be 1000 W per square metre for a sunshine hour, so it all depends on the cloud cover during daylight hours. That’s pretty variable year on year. After all, we’ve just had a month during which the sunshine hours were unusually high (and it was dry – but they’re not talking about drought yet).
The fundamental backdrop is that life on earth has adapted and survived through several ‘hot houses’ as they are called, with no ice, and several full ice ages, all without mans assistance. So yes there has always been climate change! So it’s absolutely mental to spend resources on trying to stop a grand natural cycle from doing this again, even if man is now affecting things a bit more, but not outside previous natural ranges. One should spend the resource on adapting to the tide, not trying to hold it back
In reality, it’s more resources being spent on snakeoil salesmen who claim to be able to hold back the tide despite there’s no empirical evidence that they actually can. The story of “man-made climate change” aka “global warming” is roughly The more we do about it, the worse everything gets.
This alone should be a sufficient reason to end this exercise immediately. The present story of the UN on this is All our past predictions were wrong! Because of our new prediction, we must … ! and I’m strongly in favour filling the … with stop listenting to these morons who openly admit that they don’t know what they’re talking about. They admit that they were completely wrong in the past. Hence, they’re, in all likeliness, still completely wrong.
Do they actually admit they were wrong in the past though?
More or less. The actual claim was that all climate targets must be pulled forward by ten years because the predictions which led to the Paris agreement were way too optimistic and everything is really Much Worse®.
But in plain English, this just means they had no clue what they were talking about back then and that all measures which were taken had no positive effect according to them, ie, keep on doing what we ask you do to because we didn’t know what were talking about in the past and what we asked you to do back then turned out to be wrong. Trust us again because we failed you!
Pretty absurd demand, really.
A good analysis. Regarding the fact that increased CO2 levels are good for plant growth, this basic fact has long been used deliberately in certain greenhouse farms, using some of the exhaust from gas fired heaters to ramp up the values rather then just chucking it out.
Another matter worth exploring is the political transfer of blame from one dodgy policy to another. E.g. the lack of progress into investment in features that can reduce the risk of high rainfall, such as flash flooding. Or the avoidance of expenditure in proper maintenance. Look what happened on the Somerset levels a few years back. Or the railway line breach between Exeter & Newton Abbot by storm damage from the sea. Don’t just blame “climate change”.
Published in 1871, by George Fleming (1833 – 1901), a Victorian military veterinarian and scholar: “Animal Plagues – From B.C. 1490 to A.D. 1800“:
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/sjfhgnc6/items?canvas=134
Page 94: “A.D. 1325. A great drought in England. Here, in this and the following summer, there was so great a drought…
…In consequence of the drought, the great rivers of England were dried up, the springs failed, and in may places water had entirely disappeared. In consequence of this misfortune, great multitudes of animals, wild as well as domestic, perished of thirst.”
Source: Thomas Walsingham (“English Chronicler”, 1340-1422), Historia Anglicana.
No modern dams, no reservoirs, no electricity, no pumped water – just humanity and animals pitted against merciless nature for two summers in a row. Shades of 1975-76.
Green neophytes don’t know they’ve been born.
I’m happy to be corrected but my understanding is that the ‘official’ climate narrative is predicated on the assumption that atmospheric CO2 levels are the main driver of earth temperature. I would be assuming, therefore, that if this hypothesis is true and that human activity is the main ‘forcing’ factor, CO2 levels would be at unprecedented high levels. If this is not the case then the whole thing can be shown to be scam
Millions are waking up to the stupidity of Climate Change/crisis/emergency. The new US administration is leading the way. Our duty as parents is to tell our children it is hogwash, fabricated nonsense to make money and control.
Reform will abolish all Net Zero policies and the climate change act , leave the Paris accord and stop this scam and hoax.
Who could possibly believe that CO2, the basis of all organic life on earth, essential for the food that we eat and the oxygen we breathe, was a dangerous gas and an existential threat.
Answer: most of our politicians, which says it all above their level of insight and enquiry.
As Prof Ian Plimer has pointed out CO2 has been at far higher levels on many occasions in the distant past with no particular ill effects recorded. Recent researches have also suggested tharCO2 acts as an insulting layer in the atmosphere and that additional amounts have ever decreasing effects.