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Pfizer Guilty of Fraud Pays Largest US Health Fraud Settlement

September 4th, 2009 |

Author: Lawco Staff

Pfizer found guity of criminal fraud

Pfizer pleaded guilty to a felony crime for “…for misbranding Bextra with the intent to defraud or mislead.” Read more from the actual DOJ documents.

The feds relied heavily on evidence from a half-dozen whistleblowers who give testimony that eventually proved Pfizer fraudulently marketed Bextra. This settlement is the largest health fraud settlement in U.S. history.

What Pfizer did was ask the FDA for the approval of Bextra to be used for several diseases and conditions, but the FDA refused those approvals. Pfizer then went ahead anyway and off-label marketed the drugs for those diseases and conditions.

The key whistleblower was West Point grad John Kopchinski, who was hired by Pfizer as a sales rep when he left the Army in 1992. Kopchinski, 45, was fired by the company in 2003.

Kopchinsk was talking with lawyers by then about evidence he had accumulated on how Pfizer was marketing Bextra, a painkiller withdrawn from the market in 2005 amid safety concerns.

When Kopchinski was asked about blowing the whistle he said, “You have to live with yourself when you look at yourself in the mirror,” he told us in a telephone interview.

According to the DOJ following statement:

Pfizer has agreed to pay $1 billion to resolve allegations under the civil False Claims Act that the company illegally promoted four drugs — Bextra; Geodon, an anti-psychotic drug; Zyvox, an antibiotic; and Lyrica, an anti-epileptic drug — and caused false claims to be submitted to government health care programs for uses that were not medically accepted indications and therefore not covered by those programs. The civil settlement also resolves allegations that Pfizer paid kickbacks to health care providers to induce them to prescribe these, as well as other, drugs. The federal share of the civil settlement is $668,514,830 and the state Medicaid share of the civil settlement is $331,485,170. This is the largest civil fraud settlement in history against a pharmaceutical company.

“Six whistleblowers will receive payments totaling more than $102 million from the federal share of the civil recovery,” says the DOJ.

Along with this admission of guilt for committing a felony crime, Pfizer is paying well over $1 billion in criminal fines, plus another $1 billion or so to resolve civil allegations against its fraudulent marketing practices. In all, the multi-billion dollar health fraud settlement is the largest in the history of the DOJ.