Dr. Vernon Coleman: Are These the World’s Worst Drug Companies?

"I’ve picked out some of the drug companies which I think are among the most evil in existence."

May 19, 2025

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The world’s drug companies are a pretty nasty bunch – in my view they are deadlier and more ruthless than Pablo Escobar or any of the Colombian drug barons.

I’ve picked out some of the drug companies which I think are among the most evil in existence. Drug companies have worked tirelessly to suppress the truth and censor the truth tellers but staff members who are prepared to close their eyes to the crimes their employers commit are paid huge salaries and rewarded with honours.

1. Pfizer
In the UK, Pfizer was fined £84.2 million for overcharging the NHS by 2,600% and in the US Pfizer was hit with a $2.3 billion fine for mis-promoting medicines and paying kickbacks to doctors.

2. Astra Zeneca
In 2014, AstraZeneca agreed to pay $110 million to settle two lawsuits brought by the state of Texas, claiming that it had fraudulently marketed two drugs. The Texas Attorney General, when he announced the settlements, said the company’s alleged actions were ‘especially disturbing because the well-being of children and the integrity of the state hospital system were jeopardised’. AstraZeneca said it denied any wrong doing. So it paid out $110million for not doing anything wrong which was generous. That wasn’t the only little problem for AstraZeneca. The company had to pay $350 million to resolve 23,000 lawsuits. The company was also charged with illegal marketing, including corrupt data in studies for marketing a drug to children, a sex scandal and a poorly run clinical trial that could have compromised patient safety and data reliability. The study for this drug was financed by AstraZeneca and originally included 30 children but only eight children completed the trial and the researcher who conducted the trial concluded that it was inconclusive. The researcher was paid at least $238,000 in consulting fees and travel costs. However, the study was published anyway and led to a national recommendation that the drug be used as the leading choice for children. Other studies which showed that a drug produced harmful results were never published and were covered up. A company email revealed: ‘Thus far, we have buried trials 15, 31, 56. The larger issue is how do we face the outside world when they begin to criticise us for suppressing data.’ After years of investigations AstraZeneca paid a $520 million fine in the US and paid $647 million to settle global lawsuits.

3. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
In 2006, GSK paid out $160 million for claims made by patients who had become addicts. In 2009, GSK paid out $2.5 million to the family of a three-year-old born with severe heart malformations. And in Canada, a five-year-old girl died five days after an H1N1 flu shot and her parents sued GSK for $4.2 million. The parents’ lawyer alleged that the drug was brought out quickly and without proper testing as the federal government exerted intense pressure on Canadians to get immunised. In 2010, GSK paid out $1.14 billion because of claims over a drug called Paxil. And they settled lawsuits over a drug called Avandia for $500 million. In 2011, GSK paid $250 million to settle 5,500 death and injury claims and set aside $6.4 billion for future lawsuits and settlements in respect of the drug Avandia. In 2016, GSK paid out $6.2 million in Canada. In 2017, GSK were ordered to pay $3 million to a widow. In 2018, GSK faced 445 lawsuits over a drug called Zofran. In 2012, GSK pleaded guilty to federal criminal offences including misbranding of two antidepressants and failure to report safety data about a drug for diabetes to the FDA in America. The company admitted to illegally promoting Paxil for the treatment of depression in children and agreed to pay a fine of $3 billion. That was the largest health care fraud settlement in US history. GSK also reached a related civil settlement with the US Justice Department. The $3 billion fine also included the civil penalties for improper marketing of half a dozen other drugs. In 2010, there were reports of narcolepsy occurring in Sweden and Finland among children who had the H1N1 swine flu vaccine. It is reported that not all the safety problems were made public. I have seen a report that by December 2009, for each one million doses of the vaccine given about 76 cases of serious adverse events were reported though this was not made public. A paper published in the British medical Journal in 2018 reported that GSK had commented that `further research is needed to confirm what role Pandemrix may have played in the development of narcolepsy among those involved.’ The writer of the BMJ article commented: `Now, eight years after the outbreak, new information is emerging from one of the lawsuits that, months before the narcolepsy cases were reported the manufacturer and public health officials were aware of other serious adverse events logged in relation to Pandemrix Sir Patrick Vallance, who was the Chief Scientific Adviser in the United Kingdom during the fake pandemic, and, I suspect, a key figure in dealing with the coronavirus in the UK, worked for GSK between 2006 and 2018. By the time he left GSK he was a member of the board and the corporate executive team. All of the fines and so on which I have listed took place while Vallance was working as a senior figure at GSK

4. Johnson and Johnson
Johnson and Johnson had to set aside $3.9 billion after lawsuits related to it flogging baby powder contaminated with asbestos. And then there was $8 billion in punitive damages in 2019 after the company failed to warn that one of its drugs could lead to breast growth in boys. And $2.2 billion in civil and criminal fines for the same drug.

Note
This essay is based on material in Vernon Coleman’s book `Truth Teller: The Price’. You can purchase a copy of `Truth Teller: The Price’ via the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com or just CLICK HERE

Copyright Vernon Coleman May 2025