PFIZER GETS $1.4 BILLION FROM THE CDC

At the risk of being labeled an “anti-vaxxer,” I’m shocked to have just learned that Pfizer - which made billions on the MrNA vaccine it developed during the COVID pandemic - has recently been awarded contracts from the Centers for Disease Control worth around $1.4 billion to crank out more of these same vaccines through fiscal 2027.

Talk about a disconnect: this month, the RFK Jr.-led Department of Health and Human Services announced a plan to establish a formal “injury table” for COVID-19 vaccines. This would make it considerably easier for people asserting harm from the vaccines to receive compensation from the federal government. High on the list would be myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that’s particularly impacted adolescent and young adult males who received the Pfizer or Moderna MrNA shots.

An opinion piece by media executive Donald Slaughter for The Hill’s online publication has this to say about the Pfizer bonanza: “The award raises serious questions: What demand projections, dose assumptions, or safety rationale justified such a purchase? And why would the government commit more than a billion taxpayer dollars to a product many Americans have stopped using, and which some no longer trust?” As of this spring, Slaughter points out, “uptake for the COVID-19 vaccine was quite low. Nine percent of children were getting it and 17 percent of adults. Only 3 percent of parents plan to have it given to their children.”

Also this July, Germany stopped recommending COVID-19 shots for healthy individuals under 75. Previously, the country had called for yearly boosters for adults sixty and over. But Germany’s Standing Committee on Vaccination found the routine vaccinations aren’t necessary anymore because people have developed hybrid immunity (through vaccination, infection or both) and severe COVID is now uncommon outside of high-risk groups.

So what do the Germans know that American health officials don’t? The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement spearheaded initially by Kennedy - and instrumental in getting Trump elected - has already experienced mounting outrage over the administration’s endorsement of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, followed by the Supreme Court decision letting the corporation off the financial hook from thousands of injury claims.

As Slaughter writes, “Kennedy’s endorsement of President Trump in 2024 marked a historic political realignment, bringing millions of health-freedom voters into the Republican coalition: parents of vaccine-injured children, families affected by chronic disease, physicians and scientists alienated by captured regulators, and citizens who had lost faith in both parties. These were not conventional party voters. They came for a specific promise: that America’s public health apparatus would finally be held accountable and citizens would regain control over their own medical decisions. To many of them, that promise now appears broken.”

RFK Jr. is a longtime friend of mine, and I am also his authorized biographer. In the book, I describe a telling event that took place after Trump’s first-term victory in 2016. The new president called Kennedy to a meeting in Washington to discuss his chairing a new commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity. a cause he’d been championing for a decade. He agreed, but this quickly died on the vine as the pharmaceutical industry, fronted by Pfizer, fought back. “Pfizer immediately made a million-dollar donation to the inaugural party,” Kennedy told me a few years later. “Then President Trump put Alex Azar, a handpicked Pfizer lobbyist, in charge of Health and Human Services. And Scott Gottlieb, who was also handpicked by Pfizer, to head the FDA…..These guys came in….and shut us down.”

It’s perhaps a historical irony that RFK Jr. now finds himself in Azar’s position. He’s accomplished some amazing and much-needed things as Secretary, both pragmatically and by elevating national consciousness about what we have allowed in our bodies while our health has deteriorated (more than fifty percent of Americans suffer from chronic illness). But I don’t envy Kennedy’s situation today; he’s often caught between a rock and a hard place.

Again, let me quote from the opinion piece by Mr. Slaughter: “The CDC-Pfizer deal risks more than depressing MAHA enthusiasm: it validates the narrative that the Republican establishment has capitulated to Big Pharma, that reformers have been neutralized, and that the MAHA coalition was useful during the campaign but expendable in government.”

I hope that’s not the case, but it’s certainly looking like it. I don’t personally believe Kennedy has sold out. I realize he’s got to pick his battles. This week, too, he achieved a major breakthrough when the FDA approved pharmacies’ ability to compound several peptides for public consumption. This is bound to help alleviate our public health crisis, removing the stigma on peptides promulgated by Big Pharma and its allies.

Still, the Pfizer-CDC business raises the specter of how much influence that industry continues to wield - and where all those taxpayer dollars are going. The Pfizer contracts specify just over $500 million for adult doses - but almost $736 million for pediatric COVID-19 vaccines. That’s our kids’ future, amid ongoing controversy over the safety of the novel MrNA technology. At the least, this brings up unjustifiable market demand. Kennedy has long known about, and pledged to do something to curtail, the industry capture of agencies like the CDC. I don’t know if that’s possible with an industry-captivated president. I hope Kennedy’s meaningful agenda can survive it.