Pfizer has been sued by Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton, who has accused the drugmaker of misrepresenting the efficacy of its widely-used Covid-19 vaccine, and “making false claims”.
In the lawsuit, Paxton said it was misleading for Pfizer to claim its vaccine was 95% effective because it offered a “relative risk reduction” for people to who took it.
He accused the company of “unlawfully” and “intentionally” misrepresenting the effectiveness of its vaccine and attempting to censor its critics, saying the claim was based on only two months of clinical trial data, and vaccine recipients’ “absolute risk reduction” showed that the vaccine was just 0.85% effective.
Reuters reports that Paxton also said the pandemic worsened even after people started taking the vaccine, developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
“Pfizer intentionally misrepresented the efficacy of its vaccine and censored persons who threatened to disseminate the truth … to facilitate fast adoption of the product and expand its commercial opportunity,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit seeks to stop Pfizer from making alleged false claims and silencing “truthful speech” about its vaccine, and seeks more than $10m in fines for violating a Texas law protecting consumers from deceptive marketing.
Pfizer said more than 1.5bn people have received its vaccine. The company has reported more than $74bn in revenue in 2021 and 2022 related to Covid-19 immunisations.
In a statement, the company said it believed the lawsuit had no merit, that its vaccine has “demonstrated a favourable safety profile in all age groups, and helped protect against severe Covid-19 outcomes, including hospitalisation and death”.
Infectious disease experts have said relative risk reduction is a more meaningful way to judge a vaccine’s efficacy than absolute risk reduction. Relative risk shows how well a vaccine protects recipients relative to a study’s control group.
On a quest
Earlier this year, Paxton began probing whether Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson had misrepresented their vaccines’ efficacy, to examine the “scientific and ethical basis” for public health decisions addressing Covid-19.
“We are pursuing justice for the people of Texas, many of whom were coerced by tyrannical vaccine mandates to take a defective product sold by lies,” he said.
The lawsuit is Paxton’s second against Pfizer in November.
In a case unsealed on 21 November, he accused Pfizer and a supplier of manipulating quality control tests, resulting in the distribution of ineffective drugs to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.
Reuters article – Pfizer is sued by Texas over COVID vaccine claims (Open access)
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Vaccine advisers slam US for alleged cover up of booster effectiveness
Pfizer and Moderna fare better against variants of concern – Dutch research
Big Pharma’s bad image gets a vaccine make-over
Efficacy and safety of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine after six months