Pfizer ignored the harms its COVID-19 vaccine posed to pregnant women, lied about the safety and efficacy of its product, and colluded with Big Tech to censor its critics, according to a bombshell lawsuit filed this week by the attorney general of Kansas.

“Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine was safe even though it knew its COVID-19 vaccine was connected to serious adverse events, including myocarditis and pericarditis, failed pregnancies, and deaths,” alleges the suit, filed last week by Kansas AG Kris Kobach. “Pfizer concealed this critical safety information from the public.”

“Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine would prevent transmission of COVID-19 even though it knew it never studied the effect of its vaccine on transmission of COVID-19,” the 69-page suit also alleges.

The filing holds that Pfizer’s “actions and statements relating to its COVID-19 vaccine” violated the Kansas Consumer Protection Act, even as the pharmaceutical giant raked in “record company revenue” of around $75 billion in just two years.

More than 1.5 billion people worldwide received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, many under duress from their governments.

Approximately 3.3 million doses were administered in Kansas, according to the state’s Department of Health.

During a press conference, AG Koback explained:

Pfizer marketed its vaccine as safe for pregnant women. However, in February of 2021, Pfizer possessed reports for 458 pregnant women who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy. More than half of the pregnant women reported an adverse event, and more than 10 percent reported a miscarriage, many within days of the vaccination.

In his statement, the Attorney-General also criticized Pfizer for repeatedly denying the now-verified heart harms associated with its product:

Pfizer consistently denied any evidence of a connection or safety signal between its COVID-19 vaccine and myocarditis or pericarditis…. However, as Pfizer knew, the United States government, the United States military, foreign governments and others had found that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine caused myocarditis and pericarditis.

In 2009, following a six-year investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, Pfizer was ordered to pay $2.3 billion in penalties and settlement fees for promoting its anti-inflammatory pill Bextra for ailments far broader than its approved uses, thereby putting the public at unnecessary risk of heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots. The penalty imposed on Pfizer included a $1.195 billion criminal fine—the largest in U.S. history.

While the latest lawsuit will take time to progress through the courts, it makes Kansas the second state to sue Pfizer over its COVID-19 product, after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made a similar filing last year. According to Kobach, other states have been collaborating with Kansas and will likely file lawsuits as well.

As the saying goes, the wheels of justice turn slowly—but four years on from the great COVID panic, the wheels of justice are turning all the same, offering an abundance of cautionary tales for governments, Big Pharma, the legacy press, and the chattering class.

Rather than unquestioningly promoting products that had undergone no long-term testing—which often takes up to a decade to complete—these voices should have urged caution and asked far more questions.

Rather than cheering on the imposition of medical mandates, they should have listened to those defending bodily autonomy, as defined in key international human rights documents like Article 6 of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.

Rather than narrowly assuming that an injectable was the key to good health during the pandemic, these same entities should have tuned in to research highlighting that Vitamin D levels, healthy body weight, and alternative therapies were equally important—if not better—defenses against COVID-19.

Most of all, as noted by AG Kobach in this week’s lawsuit, our most powerful civil and corporate institutions should not have censored dissent.

“To keep the public from learning the truth, Pfizer worked to censor speech on social media that questioned Pfizer’s claims about its COVID-19 vaccine,” the filing alleges.

“Pfizer appears to have coordinated directly and indirectly with social media platforms to remove information that was critical of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.”

Of all the mistakes made by Pfizer and its allies, surely this was the greatest.

As public opinion has shifted away from fear, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates, the oft-heard claim is that Big Pharma and governments were only doing their best to respond to the pandemic in “fog of war” conditions and that they updated their advice as “the science evolved.”

The Kansas lawsuit gives the lie to these claims: One of the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical companies sought to censor anyone who questioned its narrative.

Sadly, far too few spoke up against these abuses—and far too many were party to them.

As other states join Kansas in the fray, perhaps we will see the ship righted before another pandemic hits.

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Image credit: “2006 05 05 Pfizer Latina Italy 051” by János Korom Dr. on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Image cropped.