Paxton sues Pfizer for “misrepresenting” data on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness and censoring critics

This Thursday, November 30, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he filed a lawsuit against Pfizer, Inc. for misrepresenting data on the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine that the pharmaceutical company developed and distributed widely throughout the United States and dozens of countries.

“Pfizer engaged in false, deceptive, and misleading acts and practices by making unsupported claims regarding the company’s COVID-19 vaccine in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act,” reads the statement published by the Texas attorney general.

According to Paxton’s message, the pharmaceutical company’s claim that its vaccine was 95% effective against COVID-19 was misleading since said metric was based on a calculation of a statistic called “relative risk reduction,” measured in vaccinated individuals during the initial results of the two months of clinical trials carried out by Pfizer itself.

“FDA publications indicate ‘relative risk reduction’ is a misleading statistic that ‘unduly influence[s]’ consumer choice,” read the statement from Paxton’s office. “Pfizer was also put on notice at that time that vaccine protection could not accurately be predicted beyond two months. Nevertheless, Pfizer fostered a misleading impression that vaccine protection was durable and withheld from the public information that undermined its claims about the duration of protection.”

In the lawsuit, the attorney general questions why the Pfizer vaccine did not live up to the company’s claim and that, in fact, COVID-19 cases did not disappear after the mass application of doses and, in some cases, infections or the number of deaths of vaccinated people even increased in relation to unvaccinated people.

Likewise, in the lawsuit, Paxton points out that Pfizer, knowing that its data was misrepresented and its product did not meet high expectations, also conspired to censor critics who opposed vaccination mandates or questioned the effectiveness of the vaccine itself.

“How did Pfizer respond when it became apparent that its vaccine was failing and the viability of its cash cow was threatened? By intimidating those spreading the truth and by conspiring to censor its critics. Pfizer labeled as ‘criminals’ those who spread facts about the vaccine. It accused them of spreading ‘misinformation.’ And it coerced social media platforms to silence prominent truth-tellers,” the lawsuit reads.

This lawsuit by Paxton against Pfizer comes ten days after the Texas attorney general sued the pharmaceutical company for selling low-quality drugs for attention deficit disorder (ADHD) to low-income children.