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Senate Investigation Claims Pfizer Shifted Profits Offshore in What Could Be Pharma’s ‘Largest Tax-Dodging Scheme’
Four years into a Congressional probe of Big Pharma’s potential abuse of a 2017 tax break, Democratic lawmakers have homed in on Pfizer, accusing the New York drugmaker of some of the most egregious financial maneuvering they’ve uncovered.
By shifting profits offshore in 2019, Pfizer allegedly “carried out what could be the largest tax-dodging scheme in the history of Big Pharma,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said of the situation on Thursday.
Wyden — who has been spearheading an investigation into large drugmakers’ tax strategies since 2021 — delivered his remarks a little less than a year after setting the probe’s sights on Pfizer.
The ongoing investigation by Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee has also unearthed purported tax-dodging schemes by companies like Amgen, AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck & Co.
‘This Is Existential’: Billionaire Cancer Researcher Says Covid & Vaccine Likely Causing Surge in Aggressive Cancers
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong — a transplant surgeon-turned-biotech billionaire renowned for inventing the cancer drug Abraxane — has issued a startling warning in a new in-depth interview with Tucker Carlson. Soon-Shiong, founder of ImmunityBio and owner of the Los Angeles Times, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the very vaccines developed to fight it, may be contributing to a global surge in “terrifyingly aggressive” cancers.
In the nearly two-hour conversation, the Los Angeles Times owner leveraged his decades of clinical and scientific experience to outline why he suspects an unprecedented cancer epidemic is unfolding. This report examines Dr. Soon-Shiong’s background and assertions, the scientific responses for and against his claims, new data on post-COVID health trends, and the far-reaching implications if his alarming hypothesis proves true.
Soon-Shiong is a veteran surgeon and immunologist who has spent a career studying the human immune system’s fight against cancer. He pioneered novel immunotherapies and even worked on a T-cell based COVID-19 vaccine booster during the pandemic. In the interview, he draws on this background to voice deep concern over rising cancer cases, especially among younger people — something he describes as a “non-infectious pandemic” of cancer.
He tells Carlson that in 50 years of medical practice, it was extraordinarily rare to see cancers like pancreatic tumors in children or young adults, yet recently such cases are appearing. For instance, Soon-Shiong was alarmed by seeing a 13-year-old with metastatic pancreatic cancer, a scenario virtually unheard of in his prior experience.
H.H.S. Scraps Studies of Vaccines and Treatments for Future Pandemics
Several of the terminated awards funded centers conducting research on antiviral drugs to combat pathogens that could give rise to new pandemics. The Trump administration has canceled funding for dozens of studies seeking new vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 and other pathogens that may cause future pandemics.
The government’s rationale is that the COVID-19 pandemic has ended, which “provides cause to terminate Covid-related grant funds,” according to an internal National Institutes of Health, or NIH, document viewed by The New York Times.
But the research was not just about COVID-19. Nine of the terminated awards funded centers conducting research on antiviral drugs to combat so-called priority pathogens that could give rise to entirely new pandemics.
U.S. Prosecutors Probe Tip About Timing of Pfizer Vaccine
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Soon after President Trump won the presidential election in November, British drugmaker GSK brought an unusual claim to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. A senior GSK scientist, who formerly worked at rival Pfizer, had told GSK colleagues that Pfizer delayed announcing the success of its COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 until after that year’s election.
The scientist disputes that account of what he told colleagues. But prosecutors are taking a closer look at what GSK shared with them, which is potentially politically explosive. Trump for years has claimed that Pfizer sat on the positive results of clinical trials, which could have reflected well on his management of the pandemic and reassured voters as they headed to the polls.
There has never been evidence to support the accusation, and the development of the COVID-19 vaccines is widely viewed as a medical miracle, coming faster than any other vaccine in history.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has interviewed at least two people in connection with the allegation, including a GSK executive who took notes of a conversation with the former Pfizer scientist, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
The scientist, Phil Dormitzer, led Pfizer’s viral vaccine research and development before moving to GSK in 2021. He has since left GSK, and his attorney is among those who have spoken to prosecutors.
