If you have ever had a prescription filled or pay attention to medication ads on television, you have more than likely heard of Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company.
A much less-known fact is that Pfizer was caught selling Bextra, an unsafe, illegal painkiller. It was taken off the market in 2005, due to safety concerns. But when you can make billions of dollars off of sales (and who wouldn’t want to after all the resources poured into development), why worry about a little thing like the law?
When the FBI caught the company last fall, it tried to make an example out of Pfizer. They wanted to prove that they would enforce the law no matter who was breaking it. So what ended up happening to Pfizer? Nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
Because the company is so big, it couldn’t be punished. If convicted for health care fraud, it would be automatically excluded from Medicare and Medicaid. Thus, the company would not be able to bill federal health programs for its drugs and would end up bankrupt, with thousands losing jobs and revenue down the toilet, not to mention patients without medicine and a drop in the stock market.
So, Pfizer employs a lot of people and makes a lot of money for the US every year; that means they should get away with illegal activity? Pfizer cut a deal with the feds, who charged Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc., a subsidiary of the giant company.
In fact, they are so far removed from the giant you wouldn’t know the two are connected. Pfizer Inc. owns (1) Pharmacia Corp., which owns (2) Pharmacia & Upjohn LLC, which owns (3) Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. LLC, which owns (4) Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc.
This is the company that got excluded from Medicare in the end, so that Pfizer could keep its status, and Pharmicia didn’t even sell a single pill of Bextra! This is pretty much a shell company set up to take the fall. Pfizer gets caught for something illegal, Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc. pleads guilty.
Pfizer had a huge campaign for Bextra, even paying doctors to push this unsafe product to patients. The company made $1.7 billion off sales of the drug, most from prescriptions for uses not approved by the FDA. Yet Pfizer only paid $1.2 billion in fines to the government.
So for all the illegal activity and endangering the health of its customers, they are still allowed to continue normal operations, have contracts with the federal government and keep some of the profits they made from selling an illegal drug.
Talk about politics. Pfizer claims to have learned its lesson, but I would claim the same to avoid getting a harsher punishment &mdash much like a child who starts to cry after the first blow with the belt, trying to soften the punisher before more hits ensue. Who would dare smile at the enforcer and ask for more?
Why should companies like this be allowed to get off? By choosing not to prosecute Pfizer, the government has opened up a window for other large companies to do the same. Is this beneficial to America? What kind of standards are we setting here? Companies and people alike should know they can’t get away with a crime just because they’re a big name or make a lot of money. That isn’t fair to the rest of the country that is actually punished for its wrongdoings.
The government shouldn’t be so wishy-washy when it comes to the law. They are laws for a reason, not “guidelines.” If everyone is going to be held accountable for their actions, there needs to be punishment for those who violate the law.
Hannah Kaase is a senior majoring in animal and dairy science. She can be contacted at [email protected].