Big Pharma Products Mired in Lawsuits for Fraud, Cancer, and more
Pfizer’s Frauds
Depo-Provera injured Plaintiff Taylor Devorak … by causing or substantially contributing to the development of an intracranial meningioma, a type of brain tumor, which has caused serious injuries. Defendants knew or should have known for decades that Depo-Provera, when administered as intended, can cause or substantially contribute to the development of meningiomas.
Several scientific studies have established that progesterone, its synthetic analogue progestin, and Depo-Provera, in particular, cause or substantially contribute to the development of intracranial meningioma … Nevertheless, Defendants [Pfizer et al.] failed to warn, instruct, advise, educate, or otherwise inform Depo-Provera users and prescribers about the risk.
According to the lawsuit, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) noted: “Women receiving Depo-Provera are 5 times more likely to develop meningiomas”. Devorak is seeking damages on “failure-to-warn, defective design, negligence, misrepresentation, and breach of warranty claims against the pharmaceutical giant”, Bloomberg Law News added.
Devorak’s complaint follows several substantially similar lawsuits against Pfizer recently filed in other federal courts in California and Indiana. Of course, Pfizer shot back. Bloomberg Law News quoted Pfizer spokesman as saying: “Depo-Provera has been an FDA-approved medication for more than 30 years and has been a safe and effective treatment option for millions of patients during that time”.
Pfizer’s CV
We mustn’t forget that Pfizer Inc. and its subsidiary Pharmacia & Upjohn Company Inc. agreed to pay out $2.3 billion in 2009, the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice (DOJ), to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of the anti-inflammatory drug Bextra.
[Franklin] filed a whistleblower suit under the False Claims Act in 1996, charging the company with using “fraudulent scientific evidence” to promote off-label uses of Gabapentin.
Franklin’s suit detailed how the company suppressed study results, planted people in medical audiences to ask questions intended to put Gabapentin in a good light, lavished perks on doctors, used ghostwriters, gave generous “consultation fees” to “thought leaders,” and used psychological profiling of doctors in its successful bid to move Gabapentin to so-called blockbuster status (defined as such whenever annual sales exceed $1 billion).
The Larger Pfizer File
According to the website Drug Watch, just for starters:
Pfizer has had to recall some of its popular products due to quality issues and poor packaging. Effexor XR and Prempro are two products affected by recalls. More recently, the company recalled two lots each of Relpax in 2019 and Duavive in 2020, and all lots of Chantix 0.5 and 1 mg tablets in 2021.
Going back to 2014, “Pfizer recalled two lots of its (antidepressant drug) Effexor XR. Tikosyn was discovered in an Effexor XR bottle. Tikosyn is one of the company’s heart pills. Pfizer warned that the combination of the two different drugs could be deadly”, Drug Watch also noted, while adding: “In 2013, Pfizer announced it was recalling five lots of Prempro … a hormone replacement therapy drug. Routine testing revealed the strength of the drug was low”.
On 16 September 2021, Pfizer’s virtually nonstop troubles worsened when the company:
… voluntarily recalled all lots of the Chantix 0.5 mg and 1 mg tablets due to an increased cancer risk from high levels of an ingredient called N-nitroso-varenicline, also known as a nitrosamine. The company stated the recall is ‘precautionary’ as no cancer-related issues have been detected in the testing of Chantix, or with people taking the smoking-cessation drug.
More Lawsuits: Pfizer and Beyond
Pfizer, over a period of several years, has faced a plethora of lawsuits involving some of its most popular drugs. “Courts have dismissed thousands of lawsuits against Pfizer. The company has also agreed to settle cases involving claims of illegal marketing and health care fraud,” Drug Watch went on to note.
But it’s not as if such suits are limited to Pfizer and the strong allegations about its illegal marketing, fraud, and allegedly cancer-causing drugs. Even iconic products long thought to be safe, made by other well-known major drug companies, have turned out to cause often-serious health problems, plaintiffs in various lawsuits have claimed.
Tax-Deductible Payouts?
Notably, we do live in a litigious society. Some plaintiffs may exaggerate or lie about their reactions to certain medications in an effort to snag some money, in league with unscrupulous attorneys who, of course, are usually paid handsomely when large settlements are reached. Still, the number of lawsuits against big drug companies at any given time is quite high; thus, the health damages to people that these companies’ products are apparently causing are largely real and serious. Moreover, paying court costs and settlements in most circumstances is an allowable deduction against tax liability under US law.
“However not all lawsuits and legal costs are treated equally”, a 15 May 2024 article by the Ohio-based Buckingham law firm noted, while adding that if a lawsuit does not stem from what’s clearly defined as a legitimate business activity, the defendant-company’s legal fees and settlement expenses will not be deductible.
Yet, if you are the injured party in a lawsuit against, say, a big drug company, and are on the receiving end of a settlement, that income can be taxed for settlements for lost wages, emotional distress, and other non-physical claims; conversely, settlements received by consumers for physical injuries or illnesses are not subject to income tax in the US.
Johnson & Johnson
NPR reporter Tonya Mosley’s interview on 10 April 2025 with noted author Garner Harris revealed that J & J’s everyday products, far removed from J & J’s Covid injections and the widespread harm they allegedly caused, descriptively noted the following:
Maybe it’s that childhood memory of running into the house with a scraped knee [and] reaching for a [Johnson & Johnson brand] Band Aid from the [company’s] iconic red, white and blue box or Tylenol from the medicine cabinet. From pharmaceuticals to medical devices, Johnson & Johnson has been woven into the most tender, vulnerable parts of our lives for generations.
Addressing Harris about his book, No More Tears: the Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, Mosley prefaced her questions to Harris by saying:
Harris investigates J & J’s business practices, the link to its baby powder and cancer and urgent questions about the safety of many of its other products. Through court documents, accounts from whistleblowers, and those directly impacted, Harris also writes about the company’s aggressive marketing tactics, which he argues helped fuel the opioid epidemic.
Mosley also said that, recently, a court rejected Johnson & Johnson’s request to approve a $9 billion settlement … with tens of thousands of people suing the company [emphasis added] over claims that its talcum powder [often used for feminine hygiene] caused cancer.
AstraZeneca
In approximate parallel to Pfizer’s shenanigans, the UK’s leading drug company, AstraZeneca, had to dish out big payouts for illegal marketing, as announced by the U.S. Department of Justice as long ago as 2010. As the DOJ announced at the time:
AstraZeneca LP and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP will pay $520 million to resolve allegations that AstraZeneca illegally marketed the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel [in the U.S.] for uses not approved as safe and effective by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Departments of Justice, and Health and Human Services’ Health Care Fraud Enforcement Action Team (HEAT) announced …
The … company signed a civil settlement to resolve allegations that by marketing Seroquel for unapproved uses, the company caused false claims for payment to be submitted to federal insurance programs including Medicaid, Medicare and TRICARE programs, and to the [U.S.] Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, and the Bureau of Prisons.
Under the settlement’s terms, the Federal Government received $301,907,007 from the civil settlement, and state Medicaid programs and the District of Columbia shared up to $218,092,993 of the civil settlement, depending on the number of states involved.
What’s not mentioned in the case of Pfizer promoting Bextra for unapproved usage and AstraZeneca doing that same with Seroquel is that such fraud could indirectly cause serious health problems among consumers who took such drugs, believing they would work for the unapproved uses, only to find that they didn’t work and caused unexpected adverse reactions.
Companies Battle Each Other
Of course, the titans of the ‘for-profit-at-all-costs’ drug industry occasionally collide with one another in their zeal to be the first and foremost to develop a drug to treat a malady or fight a particular microscopic foe. According to Bloomberg Law News, as of 4 April 2025, the drug companies GSK Plc and Pfizer Inc.:
… settled a patent-infringement lawsuit over competing vaccines for RSV, ending the dispute in Delaware federal court … The deal blocks the parties from renewing their claims or counterclaims, according to Judge Maryellen Noreika’s order to dismiss the case in the US District Court for the District of Delaware. GSK in November added a newly issued patent to allegations that Pfizer’s drug Abrysvo infringes six other patents for GSK’s Arexvy, the first vaccine for RSV—which stands for respiratory syncytial virus—approved in the U.S.
Bloomberg further explained that this all started when:
GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals SA and GlaxoSmithKline LLC, subsidiaries of GSK, sued Pfizer in August 2023 seeking damages and injunctive relief for Abrysvo’s alleged infringement of four patents. Their November 2023 amended complaint added allegations involving two more patents.
Moreover, we mustn’t forget Moderna, another of the companies whose Covid injection was a factor in the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns, was highlighted in a FiercePharma.com article headlined: “GSK takes mRNA patent fight to Moderna, suing over vaccines for COVID and RSV”. The article under that headline, dated 15 October 2024, noted:
Nearly six months after lodging a similar complaint against Pfizer and BioNTech over the partners’ COVID shot Comirnaty, GSK is targeting Moderna in a pair of lawsuits alleging the Massachusetts-based biotech [company] violated multiple patents with its duo of approved mRNA vaccines.
Legacy Media Admits Jab Harms
Furthermore, a Utah woman initiated a lawsuit against AstraZeneca. Brianne Dressen claimed she was disabled by the company’s Covid-19 vaccine during a clinical trial and that the drugmaker has failed to live up to its contractual obligations to cover her medical costs. NewsNation, as of 14 May 2024, called this suit “The first COVID-19 vaccine lawsuit in America”.
According to her complaint, Dressen said she was “the picture of good health” when getting the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine in 2020 at the age of 39 through a Salt Lake County clinical trial. In the hours that followed, “her arm began to tingle and the feeling spread up to her shoulder, then to her opposite arm. Later, other symptoms followed, including blurred vision, a headache, ringing ears, and vomiting.” She claimed that some of her symptoms worsened, and the condition spread to her legs. In 2021, National Institutes of Health neurologists diagnosed her with “post vaccine neuropathy.”
Dressen co-chairs React19, “an interest group for people alleging injury from Covid-19 vaccines. Now, she’s suing AstraZeneca over medical expenses and more, arguing she’s still disabled and unable to work and carry on with many activities as she once had,” Bloomberg Law News reported, in a rare case of the orthodox press having to admit that a widely promoted vaccine was not a miracle substance, as most Big Media constantly imply in their reports, which mustn’t be allowed to contradict the media’s profitable advertising campaigns carried out in league with Big Pharma.
Even The Telegraph in the UK, on 28 April 2024, perhaps with a bit of reluctance, was compelled to report that:
AstraZeneca has admitted for the first time in court documents that its Covid vaccine can cause a rare side effect, in an apparent about-turn that could pave the way for a multi-million pound legal payout. The pharmaceutical giant is being sued in a class action over claims that its vaccine, developed with the University of Oxford, caused death and serious injury in dozens of cases [emphasis added]. Lawyers argue the vaccine produced a side effect which has had a devastating effect on a small number of families.
The first case was lodged one year prior by Jamie Scott, “a father of two, who was left with a permanent brain injury after developing a blood clot and a bleed on the brain that has prevented him from working after he received the vaccine in April 2021. The hospital called his wife three times to tell her that her husband was going to die”, The Telegraph added.
A Major Irony
Common American television advertisements for various prescription drugs, like those that promote Rinvoq (pronounced rinvoke), made by the drug company Abbvie to treat skin conditions, say that “heart attacks occurred” during trials, and that patients may experience a significant drop in their immunity against infections.
Indeed, nearly all the nonstop drug adverts broadcast by the conventional American media, to their everlasting profit, include required disclaimers that frequently indicate that a major hit against the human immune system is nearly a universal outcome when taking most modern prescription drugs, regardless of whether the drug is designed to treat heart conditions, diabetes, skin conditions, cancer, etc.
Given the drug industry’s claim that their vax injections are ostensibly designed to boost our immunity to ward off certain potentially deadly or debilitating diseases, it’s more than a little bit contradictory and highly ironic that the very same companies pushing vaccines also sell a wide range of drugs that can, and often do, tank our immunity. We should ask ourselves whether that’s mere happenstance — or not. And we have to wonder why, as far as can be determined, no officer of a major drug company has ever spent time in jail.
Treaty Tyranny
With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now leading the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Trump team clearly has a supreme opportunity and sound basis for permanently ending any and all collaborative vaccination schemes and other health partnerships with Pfizer and the other major drug companies, although the public’s faith in Kennedy is waning.
Meanwhile, with the World Health Organization having finalized the perilous pandemic treaty’s language early on 16 April—bending the rules, since officially the negotiators were supposed to stay within the time frame of 7-11 April—chances are that the World Health Assembly on 19-27 May will unfortunately result in the Pandemic Agreement.
In short, it’s time not only for a new media, but also to disengage with this illness-and-death complex whose sordid reputations alone should have been enough to make the first Covid lockdown and worldwide vaccine mobilisation a non-starter — a fully justifiable stance that the governments of the world couldn’t seem to even imagine let alone comprehend — unless, dare we even suggest, the fix was in from the start.
See more here ukcolumn.org
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.