Pfizer - too big to nail!

Pharmaceutical Fraud – Pfizer: Too big to nail

Drew Griffin was in with tonight’s “Keepin Them Honest” segment. Pfizer employs 116,000 people and has revenue of $50 billion dollars per year. It is the world’s largest pharmaceutical company and the government has built a case against Pfizer for marketing Bextra for uses and in doses not approved by the FDA. Apparently illegal conduct was tolerated and encouraged by sales managers.

But Pfizer, like banks to big to fail, was too big to nail.

Because if it failed it would be excluded from Medicare and Medicaid, a corporate death sentence. Millions would not be getting the drugs they need and thousands would be loosing jobs.

So Pfizer cut a deal – a shell company was created to be a legal shield for Pfizer. Since the shell company was created in March of 2007, Pfizer has paid fines (for the shell company) in the about of $2 billion (the equivalent of 3 months profits) and has set up a system to now monitor sales reps for illegal behavior, but the prosecutor thinks it could happen again.

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