Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas launched a lawsuit against Pfizer on Thursday, claiming that the multinational pharmaceutical corporation had lied about the efficacy of its Covid-19 vaccination and was attempting to silence critics of the product’s shortcomings.
The complaint comes after Paxton’s six-month probe of Pfizer and other Covid-19 vaccine makers Moderna and Johnson & Johnson’s claimed gain-of-function studies.
Paxton claimed in a statement that Pfizer had illegally generated billions of dollars in profit and that the corporation had “engaged in false, deceptive, and misleading acts and practises by making unsupported claims regarding the company’s Covid-19 vaccine, in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practises Act.”
Pfizer’s claim that its shot was 95% effective against the novel coronavirus was specifically contested by Paxton, who contended that this was a statistical ploy known as “relative risk reduction,” which the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) acknowledged could mislead consumers by portraying a treatment as more effective than it actually is. According to clinical study statistics, the shot lowered the risk of getting Covid-19 by only 0.85%, according to the lawsuit.
After the majority of Americans received vaccinations against the pandemic, the complaint claims, “the pandemic got worse,” citing “official government reports showing that in at least some places a greater percentage of the vaccinated were dying from Covid-19 than the unvaccinated.”
Along with branding its detractors as “criminals” and accusing them of disseminating “misinformation,” the lawsuit further alleges that Pfizer “knowingly made false and unsupported claims about vaccine performance against variants, including specifically the so-called Delta variant.”
In addition to monetary fines, Paxton is requesting an injunction to stop Pfizer from “misrepresenting” the efficacy of its medicine.
Pfizer is “deeply committed to the well-being of the patients it serves and has no higher priority than the safety and effectiveness of its treatments and vaccines,” a company representative said in a statement to the media. Additionally, it stated that more than 1.5 billion individuals have received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine globally, which has “a favourable safety profile in all age groups” and helps shield recipients against severe symptoms.
Pfizer stated, “The company will respond to the petition in court in due course and believes that the state’s case has no merit.”
