(LifeSiteNews) – Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is asking the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas to dismiss a whistleblower’s false claims lawsuit on the grounds that its contract with the federal government exempts the company from the laws and regulations it is accused of violating.
Last year, the British Medical Journal published a report on insider information from a former regional director of the medical research company Ventavia, which Pfizer hired in 2020 to conduct research for the company’s mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine.
The regional director, Brook Jackson, sent BMJ “dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails,” which “revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety […] We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA [U.S. Food & Drug Administration] did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.”
According to the report, Ventavia “falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial.” Overwhelmed by numerous problems with the trial data, Jackson filed an official complaint with the FDA.
Jackson was fired the same day, and Ventavia later claimed that Jackson did not work on the Pfizer COVID-19 shot trial; but Jackson produced documents proving she had been invited to the Pfizer trial team and given access codes to software relating to the trial.
The Tennessee Star reports that Jackson filed a lawsuit against Pfizer for violating the federal False Claims Act and other regulations in January 2021, which was sealed until February 2022. Against the advice of counsel and a federal gag order, Jackson went public with her story last September.
“In the race to secure billions in federal funding and become the first to market, Defendants deliberately withheld crucial information from the United States that calls the safety and efficacy of their vaccine into question,” the suit alleges. “Namely, Defendants concealed violations of both their clinical trial protocol and federal regulations, including falsification of clinical trial documents. Due to Defendants’ scheme, millions of Americans have received a misbranded vaccination which is potentially not as effective as represented.”
Last month, Pfizer filed a motion to dismiss the suit, arguing that the vaccine contract it made with the federal government under the U.S. Department of Defense’s Other Transaction Authority (OTA) exempted it from the rules in question.
“The agreement makes no mention of the FDA regulations and FAR provisions cited in relator’s complaint,” Pfizer argued. “The agreement instead conditions payment, more simply, on Pfizer’s delivery of an FDA authorized or approved product. Pfizer’s vaccine has satisfied that condition since December 2020, as the complaint acknowledges, and the vaccine continues to satisfy that condition today. The Court should reject Relator’s express certification claim for this reason alone.”
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— Brook Jackson 🐭 💜 (@IamBrookJackson) May 30, 2022
Brooks’ current lead attorney, Robert Barnes, said Pfizer is essentially arguing that it can get away with misrepresentations and fraudulent certifications “because the government was in on it with them!”
“So is it really fraud if the government’s a co-conspirator?” he asked. “That is in essence Pfizer’s defense so far to the case […] Their goal was for this case to go away and for them to not have to disclose a single piece of documentation, and just for them to be able to walk out without any consequences.”
However, Barnes added that the judge in the case clarified Jackson’s lawyers will be entitled to discovery about issues related to the motion to dismiss.
Millions of Americans remain hesitant to take the COVID-19 shots, which were developed and tested in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under former President Donald Trump’s “Operation: Warp Speed” initiative. Such hesitancy is due in large part to the forced release of Pfizer data that the company had initially tried to keep from being released to the public until the year 2076.
The disclosures’ revelations so far include reports of 158,893 serious adverse events after vaccination in dozens of countries around the world from December 1, 2020 to February 28, 2022, and data showing that of 270 “unique pregnancies” that were exposed to the company’s vaccine, “no outcome was provided for 238 pregnancies,” and that of the 32 remaining pregnancies with known outcomes, 28 resulted in fetal death.