Pfizer/GSK Takes Another Big Financial Hit for Its Pharmaceutical Greed

     By Robert Carter/October 18, 2024

     Big Pharma giant Pfizer/GSK agreed out of court this month to pay more than $2.2 billion to settle pending lawsuits against its product Zantac after the FDA pulled it from the market for being a possible carcinogen.

     The culprit ingredient in Zantac, a heartburn medication, is ranitidine, a synthetic chemical concocted in one of Glaxo’s research laboratories in England in 1977. A “reverse pharmacology” approach was used to determine if modulating an existing biomolecule might have a therapeutic effect. This research technique might violate the “it’s not nice to mess with Mother Nature” axiom, but nevertheless the product was introduced to the market in 1981. By 1987 it had become the world’s biggest selling prescription drug.

     It was not until almost thirty years later in 2019 that widespread reports — confirmed by an extensive Taiwanese study in 2022 showed evidence of ranitidine as potentially carcinogenic because of an inherent instability of the ranitidine molecule. The FDA ordered pharmaceutical manufacturers of products like Zantac which contained ranitidine to pull them from the market.

     As the original patents for ranitidine had expired over the years, other pharmaceutical companies had entered competition for this lucrative market. Last month the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi paid $100 million in out of court settlements to plaintiffs suing the company for its ranitidine product. This month Pfizer/GSK followed suit and settled their own lawsuits out of court for $2.2 billion.

     When the initial clinical trials of a new pharmaceutical product are rushed to be completed — either as they are conducted or as their findings are written up for the FDA — the safety of a product for public consumption can be at risk. When that happens, the public themselves begin participating – unknowingly – in what is then virtually an extended clinical trial for the product.

     It took thirty years for enough broad evidence of cancer in ailing consumers caused by the Pfizer drug to surface and cause the FDA to ban the product.

     That evidence also arrived in the form of 80,000 lawsuits from Pfizer/GSK’s ranitidine product Zantac. It should be noted that Pfizer/GSK did not publicly accept any responsibility for a “faulty” produce, but said that they were only settling these lawsuits to mitigate future legal expenses for their company.

     The FDA, which approved the drug, is not funded exclusively by the U.S. government, of course. Forty-five percent of its annual budget comes from the fees Big Pharma pays to apply for approval for a new drug, and seventy-five percent of the FDA’s antidepressant approval department comes from Big Pharma fees.

     Zantac’s annual sales grew to more than $1 billion within five years of its release to the public. That’s quite a return on the comparatively modest approval fee paid to the FDA.

     Even the $2.2 billion just paid to settle these lawsuits is a small price to pay for those decades of profit from Zantac.

     The far heftier price was paid by those hundreds of thousands of people suing these Big Pharma firms because of the cancer they had suffered from ranitidine

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