Viral video shows COVID going to be "cash cow" for Pfizer, pharma giant issues response
Delhi: Brewing controversy, a video featuring an allegedly Pfizer executive claiming about how his company was exploring purposely mutating COVID strains to profit from future mRNA vaccines is doing rounds on the internet.
In the video, Jordon Trishton Walker, described as Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning, claims that his company is exploring a way to "mutate" COVID via "Directed Evolution" to preempt the development of future vaccines. The man told a Project Veritas journalist about Pfizer's plan for COVID vaccines, while acknowledging that people would not like this information if it went public.
Walker also bluntly said in the video that COVID is going to be a "cash cow" for Pfizer for a while going forward.
For the unversed, ‘Project Veritas’, a conservative group known for undercover stories, had set up a date with the Pfizer Director and quizzed him about the vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company. The sting operation video was released on social media on January 26, 2023 that went viral and has sparked wide public concern with over millions of views on Twitter alone.
“We are exploring like – You know how the virus keeps mutating? Well, one of the things we are exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it ourselves so we could create preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that,” he was heard as saying.
“If we’re gonna do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses, he added.” Jordan Walker casually said that Pfizer was considering mutating the Covid-19 virus to develop a new version of the vaccines.
The undercover ‘Project Veritas’ journalist then pressed him about the pharmaceutical company’s plan about mutating the virus. “Well, that is not what we say to the public…”Walker confessed.
“Don’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell anyone. The way it would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect samples from them,” he added.
Meanwhile, Pfizer on Friday issued a statement in response saying, "Allegations have recently been made related to gain of function and directed evolution research at Pfizer and the company would like to set the record straight."
"In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research. Working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern. This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities. This research provides a way for us to rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize a newly identified variant of concern. We then make this data available through peer reviewed scientific journals and use it as one of the steps to determine whether a vaccine update is required," the drug maker added.
"In addition, to meet U.S. and global regulatory requirements for our oral treatment, PAXLOVID™, Pfizer undertakes in vitro work (e.g., in a laboratory culture dish) to identify potential resistance mutations to nirmatrelvir, one of PAXLOVID’s two components. With a naturally evolving virus, it is important to routinely assess the activity of an antiviral. Most of this work is conducted using computer simulations or mutations of the main protease–a non-infectious part of the virus. In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells. In addition, in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory to assess whether the main protease can mutate to yield resistant strains of the virus. It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products and are carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world," it further stated.
The pharma firm, in its official statement mentioned that, "Fact-based information rooted in sound science is vitally important to overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and Pfizer remains committed to transparency and helping alleviate the devastating burden of this disease."
