COVID-19 tweets from November 2020 have come back to haunt Pfizer once again. Fourteen months after an old tweet caused Pfizer new problems, pandemic-era social media posts linked to the drugmaker have again been found to have brought discredit on the pharma industry.
Last year, the PMCPA, the pharma marketing self-regulatory body in the U.K., ruled that a retweet—of a post by a U.S. Pfizer employee lauding the first data drop for the company’s COVID vaccine—by a senior Pfizer employee in the U.K. broke its rules and brought discredit on the industry. After the ruling, Pfizer told the PMCPA it had asked all U.K-based employees to review their social media activity and remove any posts that may breach the code.
A member of the public checked if Pfizer had successfully scrubbed the internet of any wrongdoing and subsequently filed a complaint with the PMCPA after finding a senior employee had retweeted a potentially troublesome post from Pfizer’s official U.K. account.
In its review, the PMCPA considered a thread of tweets from Pfizer’s official account, the employee’s retweet, a linked tweet on vaccine development partner BioNTech’s account and a linked press release on Pfizer’s website. The posts dated back to November 2020 and contained information about a successful phase 3 study of the company’s COVID vaccine.
Because the materials featured positive statements about Pfizer’s then-unapproved vaccine and referred only to relative risk, rather than absolute risk, the PMCPA ruled that the content promoted an unlicensed medicine and also made misleading claims, in two breaches of its code. It also concluded that Pfizer had failed to maintain high standards with the content, marking another breach.
Finally, in its most serious admonition, the watchdog ruled Pfizer’s actions once again reached the threshold for a breach of the code’s clause related to bringing discredit to the industry. The PMCPA cited the fact that some of the tweets “were corporate posts, approved in the U.K. by a Pfizer signatory, as opposed to an error by an individual employee” to explain its decision.
The new case also covered Pfizer’s response to the previous 2024 ruling. Back then, Pfizer told the PMCPA the “retweets in question and any similar material, if not already discontinued or no longer in use, will cease forthwith” and vowed to “take all possible steps to avoid similar breaches of the code” in the future. The PMCPA concluded Pfizer had failed to deliver on that commitment.
“Although Pfizer has since removed the Tweets, the [PMCPA] Panel considered that Pfizer had not taken all possible steps to avoid similar breaches due to the continued existence of the Tweets beyond the date of the undertaking,” the PMCPA said. “This meant the undertaking had been breached.”