Corporate Corruption News Articles

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Federal charging documents unsealed Tuesday describe how the company, FirstEnergy, spent $60 million to get House Speaker Larry Householder and his favored candidates elected, securing in return a $1.3 billion bailout, paid for by Ohio ratepayers. Householder and Jeff Longstreth, a top aide ... set up Generation Now, a secretive political nonprofit that could raise and spend unlimited amounts of money. “Having secured Householder’s power as Speaker, the Enterprise transitioned quickly to fulfilling its end of the corrupt bargain with Company A — Passing nuclear bailout legislation,” the complaint reads. After Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill ... opponents, allied with natural-gas and environmental interests in the state, got to work trying to repeal it. They cleared an initial hurdle, collecting 1,000 valid signatures from voters. They had until Oct. 21 to gather hundreds of thousands more signatures. FirstEnergy and FirstEnergy Solutions sent $38 million to Generation Now. The campaign spent millions on mailers and ads discouraging Ohioans from signing the petitions. It also hired petition firms to prevent them from working for the repeal side. “For example,” the complaint reads,” in a meeting on July 24, 2019, which was recorded, [lobbyist Neil] Clark stated that he wired about $450,000 today hiring signature collections people to not work.” Some of the petitioners worked as “blockers,” disrupting the other side’s signature gathering efforts by following them around and making possible signers uncomfortable.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and nuclear power from reliable major media sources.

Moderna set off a frenzy on Wall Street earlier this month when it announced positive, preliminary results from its coronavirus vaccine trial. As the hype grew, the young biotech company and its leading investor wasted no time capitalizing on the briefly surging stock price. Even as critics accused Moderna of overhyping the results released on May 18, a series of transactions were executed before its share price fizzled over the next week. The timing of those deals, former SEC officials said, appear to be "highly problematic" and should be investigated for potential illegal market manipulation. Just hours after revealing the promising vaccine results, Moderna (MRNA) sold 17.6 million shares to the public. That share sale, unveiled after the closing bell on May 18, was priced at $76; Moderna traded at just $48 as recently as May 6. The deal instantly raised $1.3 billion. Two of Moderna's top executives also cashed in on the boom at their company, which had suddenly amassed a $29 billion market value despite the fact it has no marketed products. By the time the selling was disclosed to the public via securities filings, Moderna's stock price had crashed back to Earth. The timing of the transactions - coupled with concerns from some medical experts that Moderna overstated the significance of its Phase 1 vaccine trial - should be investigated by authorities. Thomas Gorman, [a] former SEC official, said the agency should "absolutely" be investigating the situation at Moderna.

Note: Why didn't the media report that the Moderna vaccine trial had a 20% serious injury rate in the high dose group? Learn about this and much more in this revealing article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.

When the Indian government bowed to powerful food companies last year and postponed its decision to put red warning labels on unhealthy packaged food, officials also sought to placate critics of the delay by creating an expert panel to review the proposed labeling system, which would have gone far beyond what other countries have done in the battle to combat soaring obesity rates. But the man chosen to head the three-person committee, Dr. Boindala Sesikeran, a veteran nutritionist and former adviser to Nestle, only further enraged health advocates. That’s because Dr. Sesikeran is a trustee of the International Life Sciences Institute, an American nonprofit with an innocuous sounding name that has been quietly infiltrating government health and nutrition bodies around the world. Created four decades ago by a top Coca-Cola executive, the institute now has branches in 17 countries. It is almost entirely funded by Goliaths of the agribusiness, food and pharmaceutical industries. The organization, which championed tobacco interests during the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and the United States, has more recently expanded its activities in Asia and Latin America, regions that provide a growing share of food company profits. It has been especially active in China, India and Brazil, the world’s first, second and sixth most populous nations. In addition to its far-flung offices, ILSI runs a research foundation and an institute focused on health and environmental issues that is largely funded by the chemical industry.

Note: Check out a great article on how lobby groups like this cause the media to become industry lapdogs. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption from reliable major media sources.

In a direct challenge to California regulators and Bay Area environmentalists, the Trump administration Thursday ordered companies to ignore state requirements that businesses warn customers if their products contain glyphosate, a weed killer that has been linked to cancer. The decision flies in the face of three California court rulings against Monsanto, which markets the chemical as Roundup. The agricultural giant faces more than 13,000 suits nationwide by users of Roundup, the world’s best-selling herbicide. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it would no longer approve labels saying glyphosate is known to cause cancer. The state requires companies to warn customers about chemicals known to cause cancer under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. Glyphosate was classified as a probable human carcinogen in 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization. Lawyers for sick clients who were awarded tens of millions of dollars after suing Monsanto introduced evidence that glyphosate can cause genetic damage that leads to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They claimed Monsanto ignored that information and published information “ghost written” by staffers denying the toxicity of the chemical. Superior Court Judge Winifred Smith said there was clear evidence that Monsanto, after learning of the dangers, “made efforts to impede, discourage or distort scientific inquiry” by regulators.

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In May 2008, as the opioid epidemic was raging in America, a representative of the nation’s largest manufacturer of opioid pain pills sent an email to a client at a wholesale drug distributor in Ohio. Victor Borelli, a national account manager for Mallinckrodt, told Steve Cochrane, the vice president of sales for KeySource Medical, to check his inventories and “[i]f you are low, order more. If you are okay, order a little more, Capesce?” Then Borelli joked, “destroy this email ... Is that really possible? Oh Well...” Those email excerpts are quoted in a 144-page plaintiffs’ filing along with thousands of pages of documents unsealed by a judge’s order Friday in a landmark case in Cleveland against many of the largest companies in the drug industry. A Drug Enforcement Administration database released earlier in the week revealed that the companies had inundated the nation with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills from 2006 through 2012. Nearly 2,000 cities, counties and towns are alleging that the companies knowingly flooded their communities with opioids, fueling an epidemic that has killed more than 200,000. The filing by plaintiffs depict some drug company employees as driven by profits and undeterred by the knowledge that their products were wreaking havoc across the country. Plaintiffs in the case argue that the actions of some of America’s biggest and best-known companies - including Mallinckrodt, Cardinal Health, McKesson, Walgreens, CVS, Walmart and Purdue Pharma - amounted to a civil racketeering enterprise.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on pharmaceutical industry corruption from reliable major media sources.

Facebook on Thursday banned conspiracy theorist and InfoWars founder Alex Jones and the accounts of other controversial figures. The company, citing violations of its policies on hate speech and promoting violence, is also blocking religious leader Louis Farrakhan, who is known for sharing anti-Semitic views; Paul Nehlen, a white nationalist who ran for Congress in 2018; far-right figures Milo Yiannopoulos and Laura Loomer; and conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson. Those individuals and accounts that represent them are also banned from photo-sharing app Instagram, which Facebook owns. “They have rules, but enforcement is completely random,” said Roger McNamee, a high-profile Silicon Valley investor who has become a sharp critic of Facebook. “They don’t do anything about it until massive harm has been done and they can no longer find a dodge. Facebook is clearly feeling pressure.” McNamee said Facebook’s business model depends on amplifying content that stimulates fear and outrage, and banning a few influential figures doesn't change that. "It is sacrificing a handful of the most visible extreme voices in order to protect a much larger number of users it needs to maximize profits," he said. The Menlo Park, Calif., company didn’t say what specific posts or actions led to the bans, though a spokesperson said that Jones, Yiannopoulos and Loomer have all recently promoted Gavin McInnes, founder of the violence-prone far-right group the Proud Boys, whom Facebook banned in October.

Note: What happened to freedom of speech guaranteed in the US Constitution? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and the manipulation of public perception.

Matt Litrell, a 22-year-old Amazon employee, was distributing union fliers outside the warehouse where he works this month when the cops showed up. An Amazon manager had called the sheriff's office in Campbellsville, Ky., that afternoon to report that protesters trying to start a union were trespassing on company property. While the officers eventually determined that Litrell wasn't on Amazon's property and left, Litrell plans to add the incident to the illegal-intimidation charge he filed with the National Labor Relations Board in May. Employees at Amazon facilities around the country whose union hopes were buoyed by the labor victory at a warehouse in Staten Island in April say in labor board filings and interviews that the company has been calling police, firing workers and generally cracking down on labor organizing since that historic win. Amazon has been accused of illegally firing workers in Chicago, New York and Ohio, calling the police on workers in Kentucky and New York, and retaliating against workers in New York and Pennsylvania, in what workers say is an escalation of long-running union-busting activities by the company. It's a sign that, even as lawmakers demand Amazon drop its objections to the union win in Staten Island ... the nation's second-largest private employer will continue to put up fierce opposition to any wave of union momentum. Eric Milner, a lawyer representing the Amazon Labor Union, called the company's objections to the election "a frivolous sideshow."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

Defense industry tycoon Palmer Luckey [is] the 33-year-old co-founder of sprawling weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries. A longtime GOP donor and activist who spoke on condition he not be identified in order to preserve his political relationships said Luckey was now the "godfather of Republican fundraising on the west coast". "If you're raising campaign money in California, you have to go to Palmer Luckey," he said. "Luckey is the top tier." Anduril, launched just nine years ago, has emerged as a major military contractor for the Trump administration, working on contracts for everything from drones to autonomous jet fighters to space-based interceptors. In March, the US army awarded a $20bn sole-source contract to Anduril for a variety of drones it sells, though it is not clear which of its weapons systems are operational or have been deployed for combat in US operations. Anduril, though it is not widely known as a space contractor, announced in May it would work, with a team of other companies, on what may be the mother of all contracting opportunities offered by the Trump administration, the so-called "Golden Dome" anti-missile space-based interceptor effort. Estimates for the Golden Dome range between $185bn and $1.2tn. Anduril says in Trump's first year in office it doubled its revenue – a growth rate of 100%, but still only reached $2.2bn for 2025, which is barely a blip in the Pentagon's trillion-dollar budget.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and warfare technology.

Dozens of former students of the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, where Jeffrey Epstein is said to have encountered some of his earliest victims, told a law firm hired by the school that they had been sexually abused by teachers, staff members, trustees and others affiliated with the institution in episodes ranging from the 1950s to the 2010s. In a report released on Tuesday, after almost two years of interviews, the law firm presented firsthand accounts of Interlochen alumni, who said they had been subjected to misconduct ranging from grooming and flirting to intercourse. The report said that some 70 of the former students described physical abuse and identified the perpetrators as 47 adults affiliated with the center. The report, which is 97 pages long, said that some of the adults figured in multiple accounts that stretched over decades, but that a majority of the episodes had occurred several decades ago and claims of abuse had dropped sharply since 2000. In recent years, Interlochen also became known as the place where Mr. Epstein, a celebrated donor to the school, returned to mingle with students, several of whom later said they had been subjected to his grooming and abuse. Between 1990 and 2003, he [directed] more than $400,000 to Interlochen, including $200,000 to build the Jeffrey E. Epstein Scholarship Lodge, created to house visitors and parents. In 2009, Interlochen renamed the Epstein lodge.

Note: Don't miss part one and part two of our investigations into the Epstein files so far. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein.

Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta were instructed to pose as minors online and probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, eating disorders, and other high-risk subjects, according to internal documents and five people familiar with the project. The prompts were often designed to push the chatbots toward responses their safety systems were supposed to refuse. A single round of testing completed in August 2025 saw more than 45,000 prompts run through the rival chatbots. The companies behind the chatbots weren't aware of the testing. Testing competitors' products is not, by itself, unusual in the artificial intelligence industry. Former contractors who worked on the project described several aspects as alarming. According to one former worker, employees feared the possibility they could be generating or preserving child sexual abuse material if a chatbot responded to certain sexual prompts involving minors. Another says they worried the project amounted to secretly taking material from competitors' systems to potentially feed back into Meta's system. While a dataset of thousands of youth-safety prompts could be useful for comparing how often chatbots refuse harmful requests, the scale and opacity of [this project, known internally as] Cannes, along with the lack of disclosure to the companies being tested, made it very different from other public safety benchmarks.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mental health.

Jeff Bezos' Washington Post is facing a scathing new class-action lawsuit accusing it of using surveillance pricing to gouge loyal readers – in a case that attorneys believe could rack up millions in damages. Since the mid-2010s, WaPo has "covertly harvested" subscriber data, using "deeply personal information" to determine how much they could squeeze out of each loyal reader, according to the suit, which was filed Thursday in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Readers largely expected their personal data would be used for "mutually beneficial purposes" like "relevant advertisements" – and did not consent to their personal information being used to hike prices on their subscriptions, the suit alleged. After billionaire Bezos bought WaPo in 2013 for $250 million, the paper started heavily investing in technology and digital subscriptions, the suit noted. "The more loyal a reader became, the more data The Post could gather to estimate how much more that person might tolerate paying at renewal," the complaint said. "Rather than rewarding loyalty, The Post's system converted subscribers' engagement into leverage against them." The suit also alleged WaPo might be collecting extra information from subscribers' use of "affiliates" – including Amazon, Bezos' e-commerce giant. Last year, the publication was forced to reveal it was engaging in surveillance pricing techniques because of a 2025 New York disclosure law.

Note: Read more about the rise of AI surveillance pricing. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mass media.

AI is projected to generate nearly unfathomable amounts of revenue. Any mention of AI tends to be accompanied by warnings that deeper jobs cuts across many more industries are coming for us all. Jensen Huang, CEO of chip giant Nvidia, said in 2025: "Every job will be affected, and immediately. It is unquestionable. You're not going to lose your job to an AI, but you're going to lose your job to someone who uses AI." Increasingly, people young and old flock to a new gold rush in Silicon Valley to toil away on AI-fueled startups. If AI's worst-case scenario for tech jobs plays out ... that's still nowhere near the apocalyptic future of labor that many fear. "Is it, in fact, going to destroy all of the jobs?" Naidu asked. "I'm not convinced. Even take software. Software is only about 4 to 6% of GDP. So it's a lot, but it's not like the whole economy can be replaced by Claude Code." Convincing people that AI will replace human workers in droves is a clever marketing tactic. Not only does it stoke rabid investor speculation, but it distracts from a more realistic application of AI: to surveil and micromanage employees to squeeze yet more productivity out of them, all the while pressuring them to feel grateful that they have any kind of work. Gig workers, the people who pick you up in Ubers and deliver your food on platforms like DoorDash, have already been the guinea pigs for this kind of algorithmic management, and labor experts predict it will spread.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and media manipulation.

For decades, Congress has tried and failed to give Americans control over their own personal data: the right to see it, correct it, and delete it at will. This inaction has left Americans with no recourse against misuse of their own data, while the data broker industry quietly continues to collect and sell the personal information of millions, operating in a largely unchecked gray market. Now, two new bills, the SECURE Data Act and the GUARD Financial Data Act, offer the latest test of whether Washington can step up and finally pull data brokers out of the shadows and into the reach of the law. Efforts to prevent the SECURE Data Act – or any federal protections – from being enacted are currently on full display. Exacerbating the situation and further endangering consumers, there is an entire category of companies that have deliberately avoided being classified as data brokers in an effort to skirt even the patchwork of state-level regulations. Unlike traditional data brokers, massive data aggregators don't sell your name and address to the highest bidder. Instead, they operate quietly, harvesting your data from across the internet, then assembling it into risk scores, behavioral profiles, and assessments of your creditworthiness. These opaque calculations increasingly govern your real-world outcomes, including whether you're approved for a mortgage, the interest rates on your auto loan, and what services or products are marketed to you.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

Former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams [was] silenced by Meta's legal threats to bankrupt her if she spoke. Wynn-Williams has written a book, Careless People, about her time at Meta (then Facebook), where she was an early director of global public policy. But Meta does not like the book. It has done everything in its power to stop it, including seeking an emergency arbitration order that prevents Wynn-Williams from promoting the book, and threatening punitive damages. These serve both to punish Wynn-Williams for writing it, and to send a warning to any future critic. A certain kind of libertarian responds by saying that Meta is not "censoring" Wynn-Williams, because only governments can censor. A certain kind of lawyer may say she brought this on herself by signing a contract agreeing not to criticise Meta. Private censorship is real and, in the time we live in, often more impactful than the public kind. Not all contractual provisions are, or should be, enforceable. You cannot write an enforceable contract to sell a child, to bind someone never to marry or to give up other fundamental rights. Why should the right to speak critically be any different? A contract in which someone agrees never to criticise their employer should be void and unenforceable. That is why we need legislation that makes clear a simple principle: that the free-speech right to criticise your employer is important, fundamental and cannot be sold.

Note: Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams once told US senators that the company targeted teenage girls with beauty and weight-loss advertisements during moments of heightened vulnerability such as after deleting a selfie. According to her testimony, Meta could detect when users were feeling "worthless," "helpless," or like a "failure," and then make that information available to advertisers. For more along these lines, read about a new nonprofit called Psst, which is designed to make it safer for Big Tech whistleblowers to report wrongdoing without immediately exposing themselves to retaliation.

The former chief investigations counsel for the House Oversight Committee has been helping to prepare Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, to testify privately in the panel's Jeffrey Epstein investigation on Wednesday. Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the committee, formally requested in March that Mr. Gates appear before the committee for a transcribed interview. His request came after files released by the Justice Department showed that Mr. Gates met with Mr. Epstein, the convicted sex offender, multiple times and that his closest advisers were in frequent contact with the disgraced financier until 2019, the year of his death in prison. In preparing for the deposition, Mr. Gates has turned to Jake Greenberg, who until December was spearheading the oversight panel's Epstein inquiry in his role as the committee's top investigative official. Mr. Gates's close relationship with Mr. Epstein has roiled his foundation, which has authorized an outside review of its ties to Mr. Epstein. Representative Suhas Subramanyam, Democrat of Virginia, said in an interview that he wanted to know what Mr. Gates "knew of Epstein's crimes, and the nature and extent of their relationship." He added, "Epstein was known for befriending and even blackmailing rich and powerful men, and I want to know if Gates was one of them." Mr. Gates has sought out powerful inside players to help him weather the scrutiny. He hired John Moran, a former lawyer for the Justice Department, who helped him secure an agreement with the committee for him to appear off camera, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Note: Don't miss part one and part two of our investigations into the Epstein files so far. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and Jeffrey Epstein.

Because defense contracts often prevent the military from repairing its own equipment, critics say weapons companies are price-gouging the Pentagon at every turn. The military's lack of a "right to repair" doesn't just allow defense contractors to charge thousands of dollars, for fixes that could be done for free or very cheaply. Rather, the Pentagon's dependence on weapons makers for maintenance undermines military readiness. Namely, contractors' extensive repair delays and sweeping decisions about whether to service gear routinely leave warfighters without critical equipment and weapons systems – even while deployed. Many DoD contracts now leave repair and maintenance, which can make up as much as 70% of a military program's lifetime cost, to the vendors. "It's a cash-cow for them," Ben Freeman, director of the Quincy Institute's Democratizing Foreign Policy Program, tells RS. "They can charge literally thousands of dollars to replace things that service members could replace for pennies." Take the RQ-11 Raven drone, for example. After hard landings, it often has trouble starting back up again. But due to contractual restrictions, the military is barred from making repairs and must ship the drone to the contractor at a cost of $26,000, regardless of the issue. When an extensive repair backlog meant service members were temporarily allowed to fix the drone themselves, however, they found they could solve the problem – a broken connector – for free with hot glue.

Note: Read more on how congress has prevented the military from repairing its own equipment. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

Some of the largest data-collecting companies in the United States–including major AI vendors, data brokers, defense contractors, and dating apps–rely on deceptive methods to keep consumers from opting out of the sale and sharing of their personal information. Researchers at [the Electronic Privacy Information Center] audited the opt-out processes of 38 major data companies and documented at least eight distinct categories of manipulative design: Opt-out forms that don't actually let users opt out of the sale of their data. Links that are buried in fine print and missing from homepages. Consumers routed through multiple separate forms to complete a single request. And requirements that users create accounts or pay for subscriptions before opting out at all, among others. Major companies offering large language models, such as Google, Meta, and OpenAI, fail to clearly link their opt-out forms from their homepages or privacy policies, according to the report, and several require consumers to submit multiple separate forms to complete a single request. OpenAI's form, when a consumer finds it, does not offer a way to opt out of the sale or transfer of personal data. What it offers instead is an option to "remove personal information from ChatGPT responses," which EPIC says is a filter on the chatbot's output, not the removal of any underlying data. Researchers found that the people-search brokers they audited–Spokeo, Whitepages, and National Public Data–do not offer consumers a way to opt out of the sale or transfer of their data at all. Instead, the companies offer a process for removing individual listings by URL, one at a time, with no commitment to stop selling that same person's information in the future.

Note: The owner of a data broker company once bragged about having highly detailed personal information on nearly all internet users. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

A small group of experts [were] enlisted by A.I. companies to vet their products for catastrophic risks. Some have shared with The Times more than a dozen chatbot conversations revealing that even publicly available models can do more than disseminate dangerous information. The virtual assistants have described in lucid, bullet-pointed detail how to buy raw genetic material, turn it into deadly weapons and deploy them in public spaces, the transcripts show. The U.S. government has long planned for powerful adversaries unleashing deadly bacteria, viruses or toxins in the American population. Since 1970, there have been a few dozen, fairly small biological attacks around the world, such as the anthrax-laced letters that killed five Americans in 2001. Despite perennial warnings, a major catastrophe has not happened and remains unlikely, most experts say. But even if the probability is low, an effective biological weapon could have an enormous impact. Dozens of experts told The Times that A.I. is one of several recent technological advances that have meaningfully increased that risk by expanding the pool of people who could cause harm. Still, A.I. users would need some real-world expertise to follow a bot's instructions. Some research, including a study backed by A.I. companies, has found that while chatbots can help novices learn certain lab skills, the technology isn't particularly helpful for carrying out the range of complex tasks needed to make a virus from scratch.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI, biotech dangers, and science corruption.

Palantir (PLTR)'s Maven artificial intelligence system will become an official program of record, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg said in a letter to Pentagon leaders, a move that locks in long-term use of Palantir's weapons-targeting technology across the U.S. military. Maven is a command-and-control software platform that analyzes battlefield data and identifies targets. It is already the primary AI operating system for the U.S. military, which has carried out thousands of targeted strikes against Iran over the last three weeks. Designating Maven as a program of record will streamline its adoption across all arms of the military. The memo ordered oversight of Maven be moved from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon's Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office within 30 days. Future contracting with Palantir will be handled by the Army, the letter said. Feinberg's order is a significant win for Palantir, which has landed a growing stream of contracts with the U.S. government, including a deal announced last summer with the U.S. Army worth up to $10 billion. Those awards have helped double the company's stock price in the past year, lifting its market value to nearly $360 billion. Maven can rapidly analyze huge amounts of data from satellites, drones, radars, sensors and intelligence reports, and use AI to automatically identify potential threats or targets.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and military corruption.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla says he used extreme team-motivating tactics to meet seemingly impossible deadlines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Bourla admitted to using what he called "emotional blackmail" in order to create and deliver vaccines faster. Specifically, his team was tasked with creating a vaccine to combat the new illness from scratch. Once it was created, Pfizer needed to far exceed prior shipping and supply-chain constraints; at one point, it even had to produce its own dry ice because not enough was available externally. Prior to COVID, Pfizer had been producing only 200 million vaccine doses per year. That needed to scale quickly to 3 billion doses. All around the office, Bourla put up signs that read, "Time is life." On several occasions, employees came to him to say there would need to be a delay of several weeks in meeting deadlines. In response, Bourla asked them to calculate how many people would die during the additional weeks they requested. In April 2020, that would have meant about 1,800 Americans dying per day; any longer delay could mean tens of thousands of lives. He said he feels "a little bit" guilty about putting that much pressure on his workers. But he argues it was necessary, not only to save the "world, the economy, and society, but make them feel like the most important people on earth, those that were able to deliver." "They will never forget," Bourla added.

Note: Whistleblowers say that the speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety. During Pfizer's pivotal COVID-19 vaccine trials, regional director Brook Jackson reported a long list of concerns: falsified data, unblinded participants, and unresolved safety issues to the FDA and was fired the same day. A short time later, the FDA gave Pfizer's emergency authorization for its vaccine to be used publicly. Despite Jackson's claims, the FDA only visited 9 of the 153 Pfizer trial sites, before giving Pfizer full approval for its vaccine.

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