The FDA's top regulator just took a senior job at Pfizer

Revolving door is a VERY polite term for Patrizia Cavazzoni's moves. Then again, she has a 25-year history of picking Big Pharma over vulnerable patients. She'll fit right in with Scott Gottlieb.

No wonder no one trusts drug companies - or their regulators.

On Monday, Pfizer named Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni as its executive vice president and chief medical officer, overseeing the company’s safety and regulatory teams globally.

Until Jan. 18, Cavazzoni had a different job - director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. Effectively, she was the FDA’s top regulator.

I know what you’re thinking. Not the same Pfizer that made $100 billion selling mRNA Covid “vaccines” that failed in months and caused heart and autoimmune problems the FDA has ignored. Can’t be.

Why, yes, it can! Yep, for Pfizer, hiring Cavazzoni is money well spent. And it waited a whole month until after she quit her FDA job! Nothing to see here, folks.

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(Sometimes I’m so disgusted I want to quit. I can’t, though. Help me hold them accountable.)

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Amazingly, this is not Cavazzoni’s first turn through the Pfizer/FDA revolving door. Before joining the FDA in 2018, she worked at Pfizer for eight years, overseeing clinical trials globally and holding other high-level posts.

At the time, lawsuits against Pfizer claimed Cavazzoni, who was trained as a psychiatrist, knew and hid the risks of Pfizer’s best-selling antidepressant Zoloft.

A decade earlier, when she worked at the Indiana-based drug maker Eli Lilly, Cavazzoni faced similar allegations. Lilly is now best-known for the diabetes and weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound.

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(Let’s all give her a big Pfizer welcome!)

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But during the 2000s, Lilly’s top-selling drug was Zyprexa, a powerful “antipsychotic” medicine. Zyprexa helps control the delusions and hallucinations suffered by people with schizophrenia, but it can also cause severe weight gain and diabetes in these very vulnerable patients. (Yes, you read that right. Zyprexa causes the problems that Zepbound fixes.)

As Zyprexa’s sales grew, Lilly worked to play down those risks to doctors. And Cavazzoni played a prime role. As a 2020 article about her explained:

In the early 2000s, Cavazzoni, then a director of surveillance and epidemiology at Eli Lilly, played a central role in the legal fight over the company’s top-selling drug, the antipsychotic Zyprexa… Eli Lilly’s own lawyers described Cavazzoni as “the chief detective at Lilly when it comes to understanding the safety of Zyprexa.”

Internal Lilly emails and legal filings reviewed by STAT paint Cavazzoni as directly tied to Eli Lilly’s attempts to assuage regulators’ and doctors’ concerns.

Sounds like she understands exactly what Pfizer needs.

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Then again, as one of the world’s largest drug companies, Pfizer has a proud history of helping out needy FDA officials.

In June 2019, it named Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who had just quit as the agency’s commissioner, to its board of directors. In that case, though, Pfizer and Gottlieb waited a full 90 days. Appearances and all.

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You may recall Gottlieb is a defendant in Berenson v Biden, my federal lawsuit against senior Pfizer and Biden White House officials for their conspiracy in 2021 to force Twitter to ban me over my reporting on Covid vaccine problems. (Pfizer’s chairman, Dr. Albert Bourla, is another defendant.)

It may come as no surprise, then that Gottlieb is a big fan of Cavazzoni. In an April 2021 post on X, he called her “an exceptional leader with deep commitment to FDA's public health mission.”

Takes one to know one!