Pfizer Again Found to Have Discredited Pharma Industry With COVID-19 Vaccine Tweets

The controversy centers on a series of tweets from November 2020, including a retweet by a senior U.K.-based Pfizer employee of a corporate post celebrating the company’s early COVID-19 vaccine trial results. These posts, originally shared before the vaccine had regulatory approval, have now been ruled as breaching industry codes by the UK’s Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA). This comes just over a year after a similar incident also involving Pfizer’s social media conduct.

The PMCPA reviewed multiple materials, including tweets from Pfizer’s official UK account and a linked press release, and determined they contained promotional language about an unapproved medicine. Furthermore, the posts highlighted only the relative risk reduction of the vaccine, omitting absolute risk figures, which the watchdog found to be misleading. These findings led the PMCPA to conclude that Pfizer had violated several of its standards, including the one requiring companies to maintain high standards in their communications.

Perhaps most damaging was the PMCPA’s ruling that Pfizer had again brought discredit to the pharmaceutical industry. The watchdog noted that the tweets concerned had been officially approved in the UK by a company signatory, not simply posted by an individual employee acting independently. Despite Pfizer’s previous promises to clean up similar content following a 2024 ruling, the PMCPA found the company had failed to fully follow through, reinforcing the perception that it did not take adequate corrective action.

To learn more about the ways in which Pfizer and other companies have promoted COVID-19 vaccines using misleading risk reduction statistics, see this article on our website.