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Facing dramatic stock market declines and growing resistance to their mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna are running upbeat TV commercials with jingles and celebrities to push COVID-19 vaccination just in time for the holidays.
The 30-second Pfizer commercial features a cheery, driving tune and smiling celebrities Martha Stewart, singer-songwriter John Legend, professional soccer player and progressive activist Megan Rapinoe, singer-songwriter Charlie Puth and football star Travis Kelce.
All but Rapinoe flash Pfizer’s trademark blue band-aids on a shoulder showing they got Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot.
“Got it,” Stewart says, as the Pfizer ad copy reads, “This season’s updated COVID-19 shots are here,” and “Ask your healthcare provider if getting your COVID shot with your flu shot is right for you.”
“Got yours?” is the Pfizer tagline.
Moderna’s 60-second TV spot wants its audience to “Spikevax that body.”
Spikevax is the brand name of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine. It refers to the artificial spike protein the vaccine is designed to stimulate in the body to allegedly trigger protective antibodies to the virus.
The commercial opens with an older man playing table tennis accompanied by a narrator, who says, “When it comes to your health … you ping and pong that body.”
The spot proceeds through a variety of ordinary people practicing their passions, including a woman blending a vegetable shake (“you green that body”), a man plunging into an ice bucket (“you plunge that body”), and a man and woman playing chess (“you brainpower that body).”
It concludes with, “You flu shot that body, and now, you Spikevax that body. Because even though the pandemic is over, COVID-19 isn’t.”
The pharmaceutical trade press portrayed the ads as an attempt by Pfizer and Moderna, whose COVID-19 vaccines were injected into more than 5 billion people worldwide during the pandemic, to reverse dramatic losses in their stock prices in recent weeks.
“With hardly any Americans signing up to receive the updated COVID-19 shot, Pfizer is pulling out all the stops to increase uptake,” said Dr. Joseph Mercola.
Mercola reported that Pfizer paid Kansas City Chiefs tight end Kelce an outsized $20 million to promote the drugmaker’s COVID-19 shots, compared to his $5 million-per-year total endorsements from McDonald’s, Papa John’s, Walgreens, Nike and Tide, and was trying to capitalize on the football star’s recent surge in popularity as he dates pop star Taylor Swift.
Other medical trade journals debated whether celebrity endorsements like Kelce’s will actually help or hurt Pfizer’s sales and stock price.
Critic: COVID shot ads don’t meet FDA requirements for biologic side effects
But doctors and scientists interviewed by The Defender were appalled that Pfizer and Moderna, and the governments and media that support them, would continue to push the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines blamed for more than 36,000 deaths reported to the U.S. government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS.
A large Canadian study of 17 countries estimated the COVID-19 vaccines killed approximately 17 million people around the world.
Dr. Peter Breggin, a New York psychiatrist and author with his wife Ginger of “COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey,” said the Pfizer and Moderna commercials draw the audience into “a never-never land of fakers.”
“This is a combination of extreme fraud and sham,” Breggin told The Defender. “We now know from multiple scientific studies that there was a broad panoply of adverse effects to the vaccines as there are with some very potent drugs. That resulted in death in some people, and with more reports to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] of deaths than all the other vaccines in the world combined.”
Breggin, a frequent expert witness in pharmaceutical cases involving dangerous drugs and co-author of the bestseller “Talking Back to Prozac: What Doctors Aren’t Telling You About Today’s Most Controversial Drug,” said the Moderna ad makes a passing reference to possible myocarditis side effects while the Pfizer spot names no possible dangers at all.
“They’re not like ordinary drug commercials,” he said, adding that neither meets the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirement for describing biologic side effects.
Pfizer outspent competitors on digital, TV ads for COVID shots
Big Pharma advertising is big business in the U.S., the only country in the world with the exception of New Zealand that allows direct pharmaceutical advertising to consumers.
Spending on the marketing of prescription drugs, health services, laboratory tests and disease awareness grew from $17.7 billion in 1997 to $29.9 billion in 2016, with the largest increases coming in direct-to-consumer spending, which nearly tripled to 32% of all medical marketing spending.
Between Jan. 1 and May 6, 2021, Pfizer spent $21.5 million on digital advertising alone to push its COVID-19 vaccine, while Johnson & Johnson spent $29.1 million marketing its COVID-19 vaccine.
Big Pharma TV ad spending grew 8% in 2022, reaching a total of $4.05 billion. Much of that was “COVID vaccine-related television commercials” with “companies such as Pfizer and BioNTech” spending “large amounts of TV dollars on campaigns highlighting ‘getting back to normal,’ featuring loved ones reuniting after years apart,” according to Fierce Pharma.
Pfizer was the biggest drug-ad spender at this year’s Oscars, shelling out an estimated $5.7 million for the most expensive spot in the televised event on its new COVID-19 drug ad: “If it’s COVID, it’s Paxlovid.”
Pfizer also aired the second-most-expensive TV ad at the Oscars, spending an estimated $3.8 million on another COVID-19 ad using “star power to emphasize risk factors and COVID-19 in [its] latest vaccine ad push” featuring celebrities including Pink, Questlove, Michael Phelps and Jean Smart.
The fourth-biggest advertising spender at the Oscars was the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which spent an estimated $1.9 million on a 30-second “awareness ad” with no pharma company mentioned “to get people to consider getting the latest COVID boosters amid ‘fading protection.’”
Despite nearly around-the-clock media reports and advertising by Big Pharma and governments urging people to get the latest COVID-19 vaccine and boosters, Pfizer’s September 2023 rollout of its updated 2023-24 COVID-19 shot suffered “abysmal” uptake, with only 7.1% of adults and 2.1% of children receiving the updated COVID-19 shot as of Oct. 14, according to Mercola.
Dr. Pierre Kory was encouraged that vast numbers of Americans, a majority of whom took the experimental mRNA COVID-19 shots during the pandemic, are waking up to the fact the mRNA technology is dangerous and its risk-reward benefit presents potentially frightening risk with little or no benefit, especially for children.
“It appears to me that pharma companies are now desperately marketing the vaccines to consumers via TV ads,” he said. “It looks like their previously winning strategy of fear-mongering via public health agency proclamations and widespread news media behavioral psychology ‘nudging’ tactics is now failing.”
