This week in Hitler teaming up with Pol Pot, figuratively speaking — all apologies to my restrained editor for the hyperbole — Pfizer has announced big plans to “collaborate” with the Chinese Communist Party as a means to “help the world’s patients.”
When Pfizer and the CCP show up at your door to “help,” Katy bar the door!
Via Fortune (emphasis added):
Addressing COVID-19 helped boost Pfizer’s sales to record levels. Now, with the pandemic increasingly in the rearview mirror, CEO Albert Bourla says cancer is the company’s next big target—and thinks “Chinese science” can be the source of new innovations to “help the world’s patients.”
Pfizer needs new goals as it shifts to a “period of peace,” after a “period of war” during the COVID pandemic, Bourla told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell at the Fortune Global 500 Summit in Guangzhou on Thursday.
Of a hundred questions an earnest representative might ask a Pfizer executive if he ever went on the record under threat of perjury in Congressional testimony, some would be:
- Why do you see fit to collaborate with a government either so reckless or so evil that it oversaw the lab leak/release of a man-made pathogen and triggered a worldwide pandemic?
- Did your COVID-19 shots, which did not work as advertised and caused a host of side effects, often fatal, “help the world’s patients?” Are these the kinds of products you’re going to develop in “collaboration” with the Chinese government?
- Do your shareholders share your commitment to “helping the world’s patients,” or are they exclusively concerned with helping their ROI?
Of course, such theoretical hard questions posed to a Pfizer executive would be predicated on a member of Congress not being on the payroll of the pharmaceutical industry.
Continuing:
Bourla said he hoped to tap into Chinese expertise in Pfizer’s search for new treatments. There’s been “tremendous progress” in Chinese science, he said, and expressed hopes for “tangible examples of collaboration” in the coming years.
“We can make a difference by enabling [Chinese biotech firms] to do better,” he said.
In March of this year, Pfizer signed on to “Healthy China 2030,” an official initiative to expand China’s health coverage and develop its medical industry. At the time, the company said it would focus on improving the health of rural populations.
Aside from the very real damage that Pfizer does in its march for technological “progress,” the most infuriating aspect of these kinds of government-corporate initiatives is that the companies’ PR people insist, axiomatically, on cloaking what are naked profiteering schemes (gaining greater access to the Chinese market) in the auspices of humanitarianism: “focus on improving the health of rural populations.”
This is the legacy of neoliberal capitalism: allow multinational corporations to run hog-wild with government sponsorship, pilfering the public treasury and burning the American middle class to the ground in the process, while posturing as do-gooder philanthropists with the assistance of the corporate state media.
Continuing:
The good thing with the Chinese government is that they are very strategic about their priorities,” Bourla said on Thursday. “The best and safest way to be able to have an impact [is] when the efforts of your company and the efforts of the government are all aligned.”
Pfizer is also partnering with local pharmaceutical giants, like Sinopharm and CSPC Pharmaceutical Group, to market and manufacture products like Paxlovid domestically. BioNTech, Pfizer’s partner in creating its COVID vaccine, also won approval from Beijing to provide its mRNA vaccine in China last December—though only to foreigners, and not to locals.
How peculiar! The Chinese government is eager to partner with Pfizer for all of the healthcare miracles it will render on the world’s population – except that it won’t allow Pfizer to work its miracles on its own people.
When the CCP cares more about protecting its charges — who are essentially slaves to the state — from the ravages of Pfizer’s mRNA shots than any Western government does, you know we’re in uncharted territory.
