The Pfizer Denial

Brian doubles down on "Team Who Cares" and subscriber-aggravating Hero-deflating

Summary (click to expand):

Last night, Pfizer dropped a so-called “denial” of the claims made by Jordon Trishton Walker in time for the weekend news slump.

pfizer.com

In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research.

It might “sound” like a denial, but as others have pointed out, note what Pfizer didn’t deny:

1. Orchestrating 9-11.

2. Assassinating JFK.

3. Secretly being my father.

4. Writing the series finale to Seinfeld.

5. Both assassinating Abraham Lincoln and being Abraham Lincoln, thereby angering everyone.

Pfizer didn’t deny this. Wouldn’t they deny it if they didn’t do it? I would. And I do.

What, you say those things weren’t claimed by Jordon Trishton Walker, “senior emissary” of Pfizer? Oh. Then what did he claim?

You know how the virus [SARS-CoV-2] keeps mutating? Well one of the things we're exploring is like why don't we just mutate it ourselves so we could preemptively develop new vaccines, right?

The meaninglessness of non-denial

The issue here, of course, is Walker’s claims were vague (due to just being a clichéd impressionistic lie invented on the spot). Thus, anyone who pumped up Walker’s claims can now simply claim that Pfizer hasn’t denied them if it hasn’t denied the most vague and anodyne interpretation of them, i.e. that Pfizer was just planning to release variants for profit.

So, sure, one could say Pfizer did not deny doing the thing in the future, or thinking about doing the thing, or maybe “exploring like why don’t” they do the thing.

If I were Pfizer and someone claimed I was “exploring like why don’t” I mutate SARS-CoV-2 to preemptively develop new vaccines, do you know what I would do?

Not deny it.

Corporations do not deny specific future hypothetical actions, because that creates legal risk for no reason.¹

Instead, Pfizer states:

Pfizer remains committed to transparency and helping alleviate the devastating burden of this disease.

This is how corporations make promises. In a way that is absolutely unbinding. “Pfizer wuvs you. Promise.”

To sum up Pfizer’s response:

1. It refutes having already done what Walker proposes they are looking into doing.

2. It lists different activities that, due to the all-encompassing vagueness of the term, can be legally construed as “GOF!,” and clarifies their position on why they do not constitute a violation of 1. Namely, that they are not for “ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine,” but are instead either for the purpose of assessing the need for more development of the same, or related to Paxlovid and required for the same under typical antiviral regulatory procedures. It does not matter so much whether the reader agrees that these things meet the condition of 1; only that Pfizer has explained its mindset, i.e. what Pfizer means by 1 is by definition not inclusive of the activities in 2, and tough cookies if you disagree.

3. “Pfizer wuvs you, promise.”

4. That’s it.

Anything beyond that is unrealistic. Therefore, Pfizer has denied Walker’s claims to the maximal extent that Walker’s claims are deniable.

Yes, the denial means nothing. As always, I am not here to defend Pfizer’s honesty or integrity; only to paint an accurate picture of how mundane and perfunctory this corporation is in the grand scheme of things.

There is no great difference between Pfizer and the indifferent nurses who get Pfizer’s Covid vaccine vial caps confused and accidentally inject your children with adult-dose mRNA.

They are both not the will, but the vehicles of the will; they chaperone experimental mRNA injections from developer to shoulder(-heart-brain-etc.).

I thus find the crowing over Pfizer’s non-denial disingenuous, when it comes to numerous credential-havers who have staked their reputation to whatever small extent on the hyping of this “bombshell.” At this point, I feel a cartoon villain version of Pfizer is being shadow-boxed by expert “Heroes” to draw claps from misled readers; all to siphon attention and anger away from more difficult targets in favor of a scapegoat that “We Totally Brought Down” (nothing about the Walker video has in anyway legally or commercially imperiled Pfizer, and the stock drop on Thursday was unremarkable).

Here I should give a nod to the blogger who goes by Sage Hana’s excellent representation of the “Team Distraction” argument:

Just Be Aware of What the Op is Before you Roll With it

I, however, remain unworried about the distraction element. I formally declare my not-crow-eating bet to be that Pfizer is not going anywhere.

My interest is simply in providing readers what I feel is a more accurate, sober analysis than these rosy pantomimes of corporate scandal and “regulatory capture” that can be purged from the world with a routine stock price adjustment.

To be clear, I bring no credentials or “expertise” to this analysis. I merely offer the asset of having read enough elements within a peculiar combination of Pfizer and FDA documents and contemporary research to know when “the tone” of claims matches reality. (Also, I worked at Apple, a company which finds itself being accused of things quite often without feeling the need to deny them. Part of my job was to cut and paste legal disclaimers. For the most part you realize how much more dramatic things seem on the outside than in. By the way, as a verifiable former employee, you have it from me that Apple faked the moon landing. Don’t tell anyone.)

The Paxlovid GOF “Gotcha”

For an example of credentialized over-hyping of Pfizer’s “non-denial,” at Coffee & Covid, the attorney Jeff Childers writes of the second of the disclaimers in my and his point 2,²

Pfizer’s lawyers snuck the real admission in the second paragraph. […]

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.

I think Pfizer got its wires cross a little, intending this to a limited hangout disclosure, but also not wanting to be too clear about it.

Although seemingly part of the same thought, the two sentences are unrelated to each other. They are two different examples where Pfizer admits to performing GoF work, while simultaneously struggling to make the research sound limited, routine, and professional.

I struggle to see how Childers’ could consider this a transparent reporting of the text. Pfizer does not have to struggle to portray these experiments in any given light because they are explicitly regarding Paxlovid, a point Childers has glossed over. Pfizer’s text:

In addition [to previously-mentioned chimeric virus experiments for vaccine performance assessment, which by the way often have Sahin’s name directly attached to them and are not in any way some big secret], to meet U.S. and global regulatory requirements for our oral treatment, PAXLOVID™, Pfizer [bla bla bla “GOF!” that isn’t regarding Covid vaccine development and does not fulfill Walker’s claims].

In other words, Pfizer knows it does lots of stuff that can be easily construed as GOF for Paxlovid. So when it claimed that it does not do GOF for Covid vaccine development, it did not consider these other GOF things to violate its own meaning of that claim, tough cookies if you disagree.

None of this is, to quote Walker to his spying date, a big Pfizer secret that Project Veritas “promise[d] you won't tell anyone.”

https://www.fda.gov/media/155194/download (pdf)

Pfizer’s statement says exactly as much, in a further sentence that Childers does not quote (though at least it is in his screen-grab of the statement):

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.

Childers characterizes Pfizer’s uploaded statement as “packed with lawyerly sleight-of-hand and misdirection.” Perhaps it takes one to know one.

The final point Childers emphasizes is that Pfizer, at no point, asserts that their examples of GOF-construable activities are all-encompassing.

We’re supposed to think those two admissions are it; that’s all, folks. But Pfizer doesn’t actually say that. It would be trivially easy to add this capstone: “Pfizer does not conduct any other enhancement research.” But they didn’t, and they WOULD HAVE said it, if that were true.

Here, I would argue a less sensationalist interpretation. Again, Pfizer has listed these activities not because it wants to give the reader the impression that its “GOF!” is limited. It has listed them to make it clear that it did not mean for them to be denied by the sentence beginning, “In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine,” because in its conception, these experiments, all of which were already published as studies or known to and required by the FDA, were for other purposes, tough cookies if you disagree.

In other words, Pfizer is evincing a clear legal self-interest in somewhat thorough-ish disclosure of all genetic modification of SARS-CoV-2. However, it is unlikely that Pfizer would want to place a legal bet on having really gotten the job done with only two days to assess and audit all activities (even if some measure of risk already exists in releasing the statement to begin with³). While both disclaimers -- we make chimeras to existing variants to assess vaccine performance; we try our best to make a Paxlovid-escaping virus because the FDA says to -- are broad, they are not limitless. So this is likely a hedge, rather than an intentional evasion.

Additionally, it only would be reasonable to have recycled the "has not" construction rather than "does not," as the latter could implicate future experiments (even if conducted for Paxlovid, as they would no longer be officially disclaimed).

In Conclusion

I remain of the opinion that Walker has not revealed anything of relevance. If someone, in Pfizer or anywhere, is making (past and) future variants, Walker doesn’t know about it.

If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.

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1. Corporations arguably can not deny “exploring like why don’t” they do specific hypothetical actions because denial itself is the same as exploring like why don’t they do the specific thing; but that’s a trivial linguistic paradox and wouldn’t necessarily have stopped a legal team from passing such a statement if being sloppy.

2. Childers, Jeff. “TRIPLE PLAY ☙ Saturday, January 28, 2023 ☙ C (CONT'D) NEWS.” (2023, January 28.) Coffee & Covid.

3. i.e., By saying “In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research” Pfizer has invited the same risk that would be taken by explicitly ruling out additional construable activities, namely that something that they are doing was not disclaimed as being for a different purpose. However, since the disclaimers are themselves fairly expansive, this risk is not great, and the result is an adequately air-tight statement.