100 Billion Reasons Why Woody Harrelson's Drug Cartel Joke Did Not Make Pfizer Laugh

Drug companies made tens of billions from the pandemic and Pfizer chief Albert Bourla praised 2022 for being one of the best years in their corporate history. Pointing that out makes you anti-vax?

"Woody Harrelson Spreads Anti-Vax Conspiracies," Rolling Stone magazine reported.

"Actor Woody Harrelson spread a conspiracy theory about Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers," Forbes wrote.

"Harrelson pushed an anti-vaccine theory about big pharmaceutical companies being "drug cartels",” Insider noted.

The list could go on.

Media outlets accusing actor Woody Harrelson of spreading conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines. Photo credit: collage/several outlets

So what did Harrelson do? At the end of February, he hosted a popular US entertainment show, Saturday Night Live. In his opening monologue he told a story about him trying to read a movie script.

"So the movie goes like this," Harrelson said. "The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over," he described. "I threw the script away. I mean, who was going to believe that crazy idea?"

How well the joke worked out is now for everyone to see and be the judge of. If the joke doesn't seem very funny, it's probably because it feels too realistic. Indeed, it is probably true that if someone had presented the same idea to us four years earlier, most of us would not have believed it. How about now? Would we believe it now? Or do we rather believe in the mainstream press that labelled Harrelson a conspiracy theorist for his joking?

Actor Woody Harrelson during his opening monologue hosting Saturday Night Live on Febrauary 25th. Photo credit: SNL/Youtube.

What makes the massive wave of criticism in the news headlines so interesting is that it belongs to today, February 2023.

In December 2021, when renowned South African-American comedian Trevor Noah poked fun at Moderna, a company that produces Covid vaccines, he was labelled ‘an anti-vaxer’ in much the same way. At the time, a new strain of the Omicron variant was causing a headline-grabbing panic, and Moderna's CEO Stéphane Bancel admitted that their version of the vaccine was not that good against it. But the good news was, he added, that they would be able to launch a new vaccine variant within 60-90 days. Noah humorously raised the question of whether the head of a vaccine company should be the most credible source on the subject.

While today more and more people feel that of course he shouldn't have been that, back then the climate was certainly rather different, as witnessed by the reactions at the time.

As already noted, the issue is far from being unilateral even today, as evident from Harrelson’s case. Surprisingly enough, there are still journalists who think it perfectly normal to view any criticism on the greed of drug companies inappropriate and anti-vax.

Yet a notion of ‘Big Pharma’ and regard for the monies paid to them can hardly be an illegitimate way of making sense of the pandemic policies that were introduced in the world since the beginning of 2020. People's normal lives were disrupted by governments, restrictions were imposed and enforced with the strictest use of police power. A situation was created in which services, including public transport in many countries, could only be used on the basis of a vaccine passport and, finally, many people were made dependent on the injections to be able to go to work – for if they refused, they were let go.

“Our patience is wearing thin”

All this was further accompanied by intimidation, mockery, jeering, labelling, blaming and threatening of those who refused vaccination. This was done by politicians and the media, scientists and doctors, and everyone else in their wake. There was a serious debate about whether medical care should be refused to unvaccinated people, or at least whether they should be made to pay for their own treatment. Ideas of making Covid vaccination compulsory and fining the unvaccinated etc, became commonplace.

"We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin," said the US President Joe Biden in a speech in September 2021, addressing Americans who had chosen to stay unvaccinated. In the same speech, he announced the extension of the vaccine mandates to medical workers, shared plans to make vaccination mandatory for federal employees as well as for the employees of private companies that had contractual relationships with governmental institutions or had more than 100 employees. In the case of private companies, this obligation was later blocked by the US Supreme Court in January 2022, but the one imposed on the medical workers remained in force.

Austria even introduced a law, making vaccination compulsory, though the law failed to be implemented and was quietly abandoned.

The fact that the same drugs had serious side effects was either denied or ignored. For example, the German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach who wanted to vaccinate every single German, through mandates if necessary, and who claimed the drugs to be "without side effects", is now back-pedalling. Because of the high number of reported vaccine injuries, Lauterbach was recently forced to admit in a TV interview that the side effects posed a serious issue. He expressed hope that pharmaceutical companies will be willing to voluntarily compensate those affected – a foolish hope, of course, when governments themselves, in authorising the emergency use of the same drugs, had at first been quick to provide the companies immunity from any liability, so that they wouldn’t have to worry about any compensation requests for potential damages.

As a rule, the voices of scientists critical of such policies never reached the mainstream media, and haven’t reached there much even today. Social media companies, at the same time, exercised censorship to the point of deleting critics' accounts. In some cases, a suggestion by a pharmaceutical company representative was enough to have someone censored.

A hundred billions later

None of this is a bad film script or a conspiracy theory. It is a real experience. And for most people, it should be clear by now that there was no scientific basis for any of this.

But did anybody benefit from the situation? Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in January this year that yes, they did – 2022 was one of the most successful years in company's history.

As you can see from the table below, Pfizer has more than doubled its sales and profits from previous years thanks to Covid. Vaccine sales were 37.8 billion in 2022 and a billion less in 2021. Covid-drug Paxlovid accounted for $18.9 billion of company's revenue in 2022.

Pfizer's revenue and net income
2019-2022, in USD billions

Source: annual reports

"Basically, our organization is run on Covid money now," a Pfizer employee admitted on hidden camera used by Project Veritas back in October 2021.

Before Covid, Pfizer's vaccine partner BioNTech had a number of development projects in the pipeline in cooperation with large pharmaceutical companies and had a €100 million yearly turnover. By the end of the first vaccine year, 2021, the turnover was €19 billion, of which €10.3 billion was profit. In 2022, with a turnover of €17.3 billion, the profit was €9.4 billion.

Prior to Covid vaccines, Moderna, another major mRNA vaccine manufacturer, lived off government grants and collaborations with large-scale pharmaceutical companies. From a turnover of virtually zero, by 2022 the company had grown to a 19.3 billion turnover company, with an acquired profit of almost 8.4 billion. Moderna's covid vaccine generated approximately 18.4 billion in revenue last year, roughly 700 million more than in 2021.

Moderna's revenue and net income 2019-2022, in USD billions

Source: annual repors

"We are dealing with one of the poorest efficacious pharmacological interventions with the worst safety profile, which has become the most profitable in the history of medicine," UK cardiologist Aseem Malhotra told Fox News in January this year.

Considering that companies did not have to put any money into the development of these products – both BioNTech, the creator of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and Moderna received public injections of taxpayers' money – citizens' pockets have already been emptied several times over.

However, the amount of money still paid to the companies does not depend at all on whether or not anyone needs the vaccine. Faced with the problem of surplus doses of vaccines and having already destroyed tens of millions of doses, the European Commission has signed an agreement with Pfizer to send 450 million more doses to Europe this year. A point of absurdity has been reached: the Commission proposed in January that in order to avoid such a large unnecessary vaccine surplus, Pfizer could send less product, but receive a higher unit price.

Who is responsible for such contracts? At least some member states are not happy with the outcome.

So what do the Harrelson's story and the reactions of the media, next to the black-and-white financial results of the drug companies tell us? First of all, of course, that Harrelson's joke was spot on. But, secondly, those who had hoped to see common sense finally return unto public debate this year, in regards to Covid matters, will be disappointed. We are still in a place where the poor efficacy and serious side-effects of the vaccines, the mindless coercion and cancellation of a large part of the society, are not being discussed. Yet by speaking out against the drug companies that have made billions from this hysteria, people are still labelled conspiracy theorists.