Straight to the point

Covid Response at Five Years: Jury Trials and Vaccine Mandates
by Brownstone Institute at Brownstone Institute

“Glory Days End for Pharmaceuticals,” the New York Times declared in February 1985. The article cited growing legal liabilities as an indication that “the big drug companies have suddenly found themselves mired in the same sort of troubles that have plagued less-glamorous industries for years.” The Times reported, “Inevitably some [companies] will face staggering liabilities and lengthy court cases on approved drugs that later turn into flops.”

Later that year, a government study funded by vaccine manufacturers, the US Army, and the Rockefeller Foundation recommended a national program to transfer the cost of vaccine liabilities from Big Pharma to American taxpayers through a “no-fault national program.”

One year after the New York Times warned that legal liabilities threatened Pharma’s “glory days,” Wyeth and other pharmaceutical companies lobbied Congress to pass the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (the “NCVIA”), which codified the recommendations of the Merck-funded government study into law. Taxpayers have assumed the burden of the liabilities from the profiting manufacturers’ products ever since.

In retrospect, the glory days hadn’t even started for pharmaceuticals in 1985. The childhood vaccination schedule exploded from three recommended vaccines (DTP, MMR, and polio) to 72 shots. For nearly 40 years, the Government has been able to mandate the shots, guaranteeing billions of dollars in revenue for Merck, Pfizer, and other drug manufacturers, while transferring the cost of their products, including settlements for hundreds of millions of dollars for vaccine injuries, onto the taxpayer.

How did the most powerful companies in the country end up with a liability shield for their most lucrative products? For four decades, the pharmaceutical industry dedicated hundreds of billions of dollars to lobbying, public relations, and media manipulation. The efforts successfully purchased the obedience of the press corps, windfalls from the federal government, and an extra-constitutional status above the citizens who fund their operations.

During the Covid response, Big Pharma enjoyed its most profitable years while the rest of the world suffered under lockdowns and school closures. Pfizer’s annual revenue jumped from $3.8 billion in 1984 to a record $100 billion in 2022, including $57 billion from Covid products. From 2020 to 2022, Moderna’s revenue increased by over 2,000 percent. BioNTech made over $30 billion from the Covid-19 vaccine in just two years. Its profit margin exceeded 75 percent. In 2023, the ten largest pharmaceutical companies had a combined market cap of $2.8 trillion, larger than the GDP of France. 

Federal purchases of Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA Covid vaccines have totaled more than $25 billion. The government paid Moderna $2.5 billion of taxpayer funds to develop the vaccine, and President Biden called on local leaders to use public money to bribe citizens to get the shots. The government fronted the costs of inventory, research, and advertising; the purchases were guaranteed; and there were widespread coercion efforts to have healthy people roll up their sleeves to get the shots.

These new glory days lack the “staggering liabilities” that formerly held private companies accountable. Citizens cannot sue vaccine manufacturers – including Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson – for any harms resulting from the Covid shots. 

In February 2020, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar invoked his powers under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act to provide liability immunity for medical companies in response to Covid. A Congressional report explains that this means that the corporations “cannot be sued for money damages in court” if they fall under the protection of Azar’s orders.

In just 40 years, the system had been manipulated to serve corporations and disenfranchised citizens. Companies had once been responsible for the damages they caused, and their legal costs were an inherent risk in the free market system. Then, the NCVIA socialized that risk, passing the liabilities onto the taxpayer. Covid ushered in a third distinct stage: historic profits without any legal remedies for damages.

Americans bore the costs of producing the companies’ products and purchasing the inventory of vaccines. In return, they faced mandates to take the shots and lost their right to hold commercial powers accountable. State, local, and federal governments required citizens to become customers for the country’s richest companies at the same time they offered liability protection to the beneficiaries.

Predictably, pharmaceutical companies ignored warning signs from their clinical trials. In June 2023, confidential Pfizer documents revealed that the company observed over 1.5 million adverse reactions to Covid vaccines, including 75,000 vascular disorders, 100,000 blood and lymphatic disorders, 125,000 cardiac disorders, 175,000 reproductive disorders, and 190,000 respiratory disorders. Most of these occurred in healthy young adults, with 92% of reporters having zero comorbidities. In January 2025, Alex Berenson revealed that Moderna covered up the death of a preschool-aged child during its Covid mRNA vaccine trials. Despite federal requirements to report all trial information, the company withheld the truth of the child’s death from “cardio-respiratory arrest” for years.

So how did that happen? In a healthy system, government officials would serve as vigilant regulators, remaining averse to corruption and deception. Instead, a revolving door emerged between the pharmaceutical industry and the government agencies responsible for monitoring them. This process subverted the purpose of the Seventh Amendment and created an unprecedented system of “glory days” for Big Pharma. 

Subverting the Seventh Amendment 

The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in civil cases. At the time of its ratification in 1791, advocates of the amendment sought to protect the rights of common citizens against commercial powers that would otherwise corrupt the judicial system for their own benefit. 

In Federal Farmer IV (1787), the author, writing under a pseudonym, argued that the jury system was “essential in every free country” to maintain the independence of the judiciary. Without the protection of the Seventh Amendment, the powerful – “the well born” – would wield the power of the judiciary, and they would be “generally disposed, and very naturally too, to favour those of their own description.”

Sir William Blackstone called jury trials “the glory of the English law.” Like Federal Farmer IV, he wrote that the absence of a jury would result in a judicial system run by men with “an involuntary bias towards those of their own rank and dignity.” It became central to the cause of the Revolution when Jefferson listed King George III’s denial of “the benefits of trial by jury” as a grievance in the Declaration of Independence.

Centuries later, we have returned to a system that denies citizens the right to jury trials. The judicial system has been warped for the benefit of commercial interests. The revolving door between Big Pharma and government, coupled with the denial of trial by jury, creates a system in which regulators favor “those of their own rank and dignity.”

Congress enjoys a collusive and mutually beneficial relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. In 2018, Kaiser Health News found that “Nearly 340 former congressional staffers now work for pharmaceutical companies or their lobbying firms.”

The cozy relationship extends to unelected officials. Alex Azar, the HHS Secretary responsible for enacting the PREP Act, was president of the US division of Eli Lilly from 2012 to 2017. There, he oversaw significant price increases for drugs, including doubling the price of its insulin medicine. Scott Gottlieb resigned as Commissioner of the FDA in 2019 to join Pfizer’s Board of Directors. During the pandemic, Gottlieb advocated for lockdowns and censorship, even encouraging Twitter to suppress pro-vaccine doctors who discussed natural immunity.

Biden White House Counselor Steve Richetti worked as a lobbyist for twenty years before joining the Biden Administration. His clients included Novartis, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer. The New York Times described him as “one of [Biden’s] most loyal advisers, and someone Mr. Biden will almost certainly turn to in times of crisis or in stressful moments.”

In May 2023, President Biden announced his nomination of Dr. Monica Bertagnolli as Director of the NIH. From 2015-2021, Bartagnolli received over $275 million in grants from Pfizer, amounting to 90% of her research funding.

The corruption is more direct than mere influence peddling. The pharmaceutical industry directly finances 75% of the FDA’s drug division through “user fees,” a negotiated rate paid to the agency during the drug approval process. “It’s kind of like a devil’s bargain,” says Dr. Joseph Ross, a professor at Yale School of Medicine. “Because it turns…into the F.D.A. essentially asking industry, ‘What can we do to secure this money?” Senator Bernie Sanders put it more simply: “The industry, in a sense, is regulating itself.”

The merger of power between the pharmaceutical industry and the U.S. government has created a system of mass profits without accountability. Just as Blackstone warned, this warped legal system allows the powerful to insulate those of their “own rank and dignity” from the accountability of jury trials.

Australian Senator Gerard Rennick explained: “Moderna, like Pfizer or Astra Zeneca (sic), aren’t prepared to back up their ‘safe and effective’ mantra by underwriting the safety of the vaccines. They passed the buck onto governments whose politicians lacked the spine to stand up for the people they claim to represent.”

In August 2023, Rennick questioned Moderna executives in the Australian Senate. “You’re not prepared to underwrite the safety of your own vaccine,” he explained. The Moderna executive repeatedly deflected, responding that “indemnities are a matter for policymakers.”

But Big Pharma had deliberately inserted themselves in the policymaking process, usurping the role of the jury trial through the convergence of private and public power. Through billions of dollars in lobbying, Corona-law overtook the Western legal tradition and rigged the system to protect the most powerful forces in our society at the cost of the taxpayer, destroying the Seventh Amendment and its underlying purposes in the process.

The Influence Campaign: Lobbying, Advertising, and Deceiving

Pfizer and Big Pharma bolster this liability shield with widespread marketing campaigns and lobbying. From 2020 to 2022, the pharmaceutical and health products industry spent $1 billion on lobbying. For context, that was more than five times as much as the commercial banking industry spent on lobbying during the same time period. In those three years, Big Pharma spent more on lobbying than the oil, gas, alcohol, gambling, farming, and defense industries combined. 

Big Pharma dedicates even more resources to buying the hearts and minds of the American people and their media outlets, expanding the influence campaign by controlling the information that consumers can access.

Pharmaceutical companies spent significantly more money on advertising and marketing than research and development (R&D) during Covid. In 2020, Pfizer spent $12 billion on sales and marketing and $9 billion on R&D. That year, Johnson & Johnson devoted $22 billion to sales and marketing and $12 billion to R&D. 

Combined, AbbVie, Pfizer, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, Bayer, and J&J spent 50% more on advertising than R&D in 2020. They advertise prescription products that consumers cannot get on their own, indicating that the spending is designed to control the news media, not increase drug sales.

“The key point about pharma advertising is they don’t spend to impact customers who watch news. It’s to impact the news itself,” explains former pharmaceutical consultant Calley Means.

“Pharma sees ad spending as part of their lobbying and public affairs budget. It is a way to buy off news networks to influence the debate.”

Just as Means described, billions of dollars in advertising resulted in millions of Americans tuning into programming sponsored by Pfizer, including Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, Meet the Press, 60 Minutes, CNN Tonight, Erin Burnett OutFront, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Anderson Cooper 360, and ABC Nightline. For the most part, reporters obsequiously bowed to the thinly veiled system of paying off the Fourth Estate. Throughout Covid, the press promoted Big Pharma’s products and seldom mentioned its history of unjust enrichment, fraud, and criminal pleas

This media landscape subjected Americans to the approved lies of the corporate press. Talking heads and government officials worked in unison to support their financial sponsors through moral bludgeoning.

“Literally the only people dying are the unvaccinated,” Chuck Todd told his viewers. “And for those of you spreading misinformation, shame on you. Shame on you. I don’t know how some of you sleep at night.” By 2022, the majority of people dying from Covid were vaccinated. 

Mika Brzezinski took a similarly direct approach to her MSNBC viewers: “You are the unvaccinated, you are the problem.” The White House, dedicated viewers of Morning Joe, adopted Mika’s strident tone.  “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” President Biden told the unvaccinated in September in 2021. “And your refusal has cost all of us.”

CNN’s Don Lemon told Chris Cuomo, “the only people you can blame – this isn’t shaming, this is the truth…maybe they should be shamed – are the unvaccinated.” MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart lectured the unvaccinated, “Anyone you come into contact with will blame you. As will the rest of us, who have done the right thing by getting vaccinated.” 

“There is no excuse — no excuse for anyone being unvaccinated,” Biden scolded his citizens in 2022.

Frequent CNN contributor Dr. Leana Wen repeatedly expressed her outrage at the unvaccinated. “People are not behaving honorably. The unvaccinated are basically saying, Well it’s open season for me.” She told viewers that choosing to stay unvaccinated was akin to “the choice to drive intoxicated.” 

In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik delivered the headline: “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary.”

Howard Stern called for mandatory vaccinations and told those who disagreed with him, “Fuck your freedom.” But Stern was no longer a gadfly provocateur; he was a mouthpiece for the most powerful entities in the country, who welcomed the opportunity to tarnish the Bill of Rights in a liability-free nation of mandates. 

Unavoidably Unsafe, Undeniably Ineffective, and Unapologetically Corrupt

The Biden White House bolstered the private-sector influence campaign, with the federal government shelling out billions to media companies to advertise the Covid vaccines. In March 2022, Blaze reported:

“In response to a FOIA request filed by TheBlaze, HHS revealed that it purchased advertising from major news networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as cable TV news stations Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, legacy media publications including the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, digital media companies like BuzzFeed News and Newsmax, and hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations. These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety.”

“Safe and effective” became echoed so frequently in the media landscape that few bothered to investigate whether the tagline was true. The slogan contradicted long-standing understandings of inherent risk. In 1986, the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a report that described vaccines as “unavoidably unsafe.” The Supreme Court cited the “unavoidably unsafe” determination, describing the products “in the present state of human knowledge,” as “quite incapable of being made safe for their intended and ordinary use.”

Further, there was never evidence that the shots were “effective.” A Pfizer study showed that 20% of those who received the company’s Covid vaccines got Covid within two months, while 1% of the participants in the trial reported “cardiac disorders” after their first shots. Company executives admitted under sworn testimony that the company never tested the efficacy of the vaccines against transmission before marketing them.

In October 2022, Pfizer spokeswoman Janine Small appeared at a European Parliament hearing. “Was the Pfizer Covid vaccine tested on stopping transmission of the virus before it entered the market?” asked Dutch MEP Rob Roos. “No!” Small responded emphatically. “We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market; and from that point of view, we had to do everything at risk.”

The “risk” appeared to be substantial. Days before Small’s testimony, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo released an analysis showing an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death in males 18-39 within 28 days of mRNA vaccination. 

By June 2021, the United States Vaccine Adverse Effective Reporting System (VAERS) reported 4,812 deaths from the Covid vaccine as well as 21,440 hospitalizations. For context, VAERS has reported just 5,039 deaths from all other vaccine reports combined since 1990. In January 2023, VAERS exceeded one million adverse events reported from the Covid vaccine as well as 21,000 deaths, with 30% of those deaths taking place within 48 hours of vaccination. The European Medicines Agency linked Covid vaccines to facial paralysis, tingling sensations, numbness, and tinnitus. The CDC later admitted that the shots are linked to heart inflammation (myocarditis), particularly in young men, as well as Guillain-Barre syndrome and blood clotting. 

Dr. Buddy Creech, 50, led Covid vaccine trials at Vanderbilt University before developing tinnitus and heart racing after receiving the shot. Creech said his tinnitus and racing heart lasted about a week after each shot. “When our patients experience a side effect that may or may not be related to the vaccine, we owe it to them to investigate that as completely as we can,” he told the New York Times. 

“Safe and effective” turned out to be a pharmaceutical advertising slogan parroted in the press corps that relied on the steady stream of advertising revenue from the companies it was covering. The US government also joined the cover-up in its fanatical crusade to jab as many citizens as possible. 

In January 2024, the Epoch Times revealed that the CDC drafted an “alert on myocarditis and mRNA vaccines” in May 2021 for state and local officials, warning them of the connection between heart inflammation and Covid-19 shots. The author of the report, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, evidently decided not to publicize his findings.  

The CDC later sent repeated alerts encouraging Covid-19 vaccination but never published its warnings on myocarditis. Dr. Tracy Hoeg, a California epidemiologist, told the Epoch Times, “We had data from our own Department of Defense at this time indicating it was a real safety signal and two fatal post-Pfizer vaccination myocarditis cases had already been reported in Israel.”

When Daskalakis drafted the alert, the overwhelming majority of American teenagers had not received Covid shots. No state had a vaccination rate above 14% for 12- to 17-year-olds. In California, 90% of that age cohort was unvaccinated. In the following two years, the CDC never published its alert, and the country injected millions of teenagers with the shots. Within two years, 84% of California teenagers had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine; more than one in five had received a booster.

Big Pharma’s influence campaign extended beyond the media landscape. Medical journals have long been beholden to corporate interests. As of 2017, half of the editors of American medical journals receive payments from drug companies. Companies pay doctors to list themselves as the authors to enhance their reports’ credibility in a system known as “medical ghost-writing.”

Once Covid vaccines came along, Pfizer paid organizations to promote vaccine mandates for employees. In August 2021, Chicago Urban League President Karen Freeman-Wilson announced the organization’s support for Covid vaccine mandates. She did not disclose that her group had just received a $100,000 grant from Pfizer to launch a “vaccine safety and effectiveness campaign.” Weeks later, the National Consumers League announced, “It has become evidence that employer mandates are effective at nudging reluctant people to get the Covid-19 vaccine.” The previous month, Pfizer gave the group $75,000 for “vaccine policy efforts.” The American Academy of Pediatrics had local chapters lobby for pro-vaccine state policies after receiving $250,000 from Pfizer, including “immunization legislation” advocacy grants.

Other groups that promoted mandates after receiving Pfizer grants included the National Consumers League, the American Pharmacists Association, the American College of Preventive Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Pathology, and the American College of Emergency Physicians. None of them disclosed their financial incentives.

There was an integrated public relations strategy for pharmaceutical companies to maintain their protected status of supra-legal profiteers. Not only did they purchase the obedience of the news media, but they also used financial coercion to ensure that the medical establishment had no power to oppose them.

Upon the release of Pfizer’s 2022 Annual Report, CEO Albert Bourla stressed the importance of customer’s “positive perception” of the pharmaceutical giant. 

“2022 was a record-breaking year for Pfizer, not only in terms of revenue and earnings per share, which were the highest in our long history,” Bourla noted. “But more importantly, in terms of the percentage of patients who have a positive perception of Pfizer and the work we do.”

The industry dedicated billions of dollars to manipulating Americans into taking its products while their government stripped them of their right to legal action; citizens, devoid of the ability to hold the companies accountable in the court of law, continue to subsidize the federal-pharmaceutical hegemon with their tax dollars. 

In effect, the federal government sold the Seventh Amendment to the largest lobbying force in the country. This transferred power from the citizenry to the nation’s ruling class and exchanged a constitutional right for a corporate liability shield. 

Covid Response at Five Years: Jury Trials and Vaccine Mandates
by Brownstone Institute at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society

Source: Brownstone Institute Read the original article here: https://brownstone.org/