How the Government Protected Pharma, and Robbed You of Your 7th Amendment Rights

 

Alex Azar Robbed You of Your God-Given Human Rights

From 2000 to 2018, 35 pharmaceutical companies reported cumulative revenue of $11.5 trillion. A study found that this was “significantly greater than other larger, public companies in the same time frame.” 

Pfizer’s annual revenue jumped from $3.8 billion in 1984 to a record $100 billion in 2022. The company’s Covid products, including its vaccine and Paxlovid accounted for $57 billion of that income.

The US Government provided a steady stream of taxpayer dollars for Big Pharma’s revenue and shielded the benefiting companies from the cost of litigation. 

Federal purchases of Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA Covid vaccines have totalled more than $25 billion. The government paid Moderna $2.5 billion of taxpayer funds to develop the vaccine, and President Biden called on local leaders to use public money to bribe citizens to get the shots.

These new glory days lack the “staggering liabilities” that formerly held private companies accountable. Citizens cannot sue vaccine manufacturers – including Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson – for any harms resulting from the Covid shots. 

In February 2020, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar invoked his powers under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act to provide liability immunity for medical companies in response to Covid.

Azar repeatedly amended the order to continue providing liability immunity for pharmaceutical companies. A Congressional report explains that this means that the corporations “cannot be sued for money damages in court” if they fall under the protection of Azar’s orders. 

Americans bore costs related to producing the company’s products and purchasing the inventory of vaccines. In return, they faced mandates to take the mRNA shots, and they lost their right to hold commercial powers accountable for malfeasance. 

This process subverted the purpose of the Seventh Amendment and created a new system of “glory days” for Big Pharma. 

The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in civil cases. At the time of its ratification in 1791, advocates of the amendment sought to protect the rights of common citizens against commercial powers that would otherwise corrupt the judicial system for their own benefit. 

In Federal Farmer IV (1787), the author, writing under a pseudonym, argued that the jury system was “essential in every free country” to maintain the independence of the judiciary. Without the protection of the Seventh Amendment, hegemonic forces – “the well born” – would wield the power of the judiciary, and they would be “generally disposed, and very naturally too, to favour those of their own description.”

Sir William Blackstone called jury trials “the glory of the English law.” Like Federal Farmer IV, he wrote that the absence of a jury would result in a judicial system run by men with “an involuntary bias towards those of their own rank and dignity.”

The Declaration of Independence listed King George III’s denial of “the benefits of trial by jury” to colonists as a grievance that led to the American Revolution.

Centuries later, we have returned to a system that denies citizens the right to jury trials for the benefit of commercial interests. 

The revolving door between Big Pharma and government, coupled with the denial of trial by jury, threatens that those who control the regulation and litigation process will favor “those of their own rank and dignity.”

Alex Azar, the HHS Secretary responsible for enacting the PREP Act, was president of the US division of Eli Lilly from 2012 to 2017. There, he oversaw significant price increases for drugs. For example, Eli Lilly doubled the price of its insulin medicine from 2011 to 2016. 

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