Pfizer Gets Sued Again. Why Is BioNTech Escaping Justice?

As discussed by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson on the Daily Sceptic here, Kansas has become the second U.S. state, after Texas, to sue Pfizer for deceptive marketing statements in connection with “its” COVID-19 vaccine – and apparently several other states are to follow. But, firstly, what “marketing”? The drug in question was purchased by the U.S. Government and it was, above all, the Government, including state governments, which coerced and cajoled the public into taking it. It was not sold to individual customers.

And, secondly, Pfizer does not even have a COVID-19 vaccine. As I have shown over and over again, Pfizer is merely a contract manufacturer which produces said COVID-19 vaccine on behalf of the German firm BioNTech. BioNTech is the legal manufacture and ‘owner’ of the product. It should not have taken the Kansas Attorney General’s office any great effort of research to find this out, since the fact that Pfizer manufactures the drug on BioNTech’s behalf is clearly indicated on the product’s very packaging, as can be seen below.

Moreover, it is also clearly indicated in all the relevant regulatory documents. See here, for example, from the FDA and the screen cap below.

If any pertinent misleading statements, perhaps indeed – let’s not mince words – outright fraudulent claims, were made, they would, of course, have been made in the authorisation process, not in any non-existent ‘marketing’. But here too, the exact same relationship of principal (BioNTech) and agent (Pfizer) exists as in the manufacturing process. Pfizer serves as BioNTech’s agent, as can be seen in the Biologics Licence Application below.

Since it is not in fact its product, unsurprisingly Pfizer was not the sponsor of the clinical trial of “its” COVID-19 vaccine. BioNTech was, and it was the party responsible for the submission of materials to be made publicly available on the federal Government’s clinical trials website.

Here is the clinicaltrials.gov entry for the clinical trial of ‘Pfizer’s’ COVID-19 vaccine.

Where does anyone see anything about Pfizer? In fact, you can find Pfizer by scrolling much further down the page, where Pfizer is identified as BioNTech’s collaborator and as “investigator”.

In other words, Pfizer was the investigator which carried out the clinical trial on BioNTech’s behalf.

Here, by the way, is the entry for the trial in pregnant women cited by the Kansas attorney general, as well as Heneghan and Jefferson.

Exactly the same applies.

The famous Wistar rat biodistribution study to which Heneghan and Jefferson refer was in fact sponsored by Acuitas, the Canadian manufacturer of the lipid nanoparticles in which the BioNTech mRNA is packed, and it was included by BioNTech in its submission to the FDA on non-clinical (i.e., animal) testing. The entire pre-clinical programme strictly speaking, i.e., the animal testing conducted prior to the initiation of testing on humans, was conducted by BioNTech without any involvement of Pfizer. The study is here. The submission is here.

Finally, it is worth noting, as I already showed two years ago in my ‘50-50 Split: BioNTech and the Pfizer Illusion‘, that Pfizer shares whatever profits it earns on sales of the COVID-19 vaccine 50-50 with BioNTech and, in addition, has paid BioNTech substantial milestone payments. So, overall, BioNTech has in fact earned more than Pfizer on sales of what is, after all, its drug, both in the U.S. and internationally.

For the international figures, including markets on which BioNTech sells the drug without Pfizer’s involvement, see my calculations here. In 2021 and 2022, BioNTech made over $31 billion in profits on sales of the COVID-19 vaccine, to which another billion or so can now be added for 2023. The company’s profit margin was nearly 80%, roughly three times that of Pfizer.

So, if Americans were indeed misled, how can the Kansas Attorney General and the other Attorneys General not be interested in the main beneficiary of the deception? Why the focus on the agent and not the principal, on the accomplice but not the perp? How can the U.S. Attorneys General fail to see what is plainly visible in the very documents they cite: namely, the primary responsibility of BioNTech? And why do so many critics of the so-called vaccine share this blindness, which, going on nearly four years now since authorisation, cannot but appear somewhat wilful?

Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack.