Psychiatrist Patrizia Cavazzoni, lately of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has returned to her old home at Pfizer as its chief medical officer.
Pfizer knows how to reward its friends and Cavazzoni has been a friend-and-a-half. As the FDA’s director of its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (pharma speak for the final approval stop for new drugs before they reach the market), Cavazzoni didn’t forget her old stomping grounds. Under her baton, according to the website Fierce Pharma, the FDA handed Pfizer a “bumper crop” of approved drugs in 2023—more than double their closest competitor. And that after the pharmaceutical giant became the first to top $100 billion in revenue the year before.
Let’s not call it a quid pro quo, even though she is now guaranteed a “welcome back, Patrizia” party.
Cavazzoni’s lofty position at the FDA placed her squarely in a make-or-break position for smaller drug companies who sweat through the approval process as a feast-or-famine proposition, depending on the outcome.
For larger companies like Pfizer, disapproval (though not the end of the world) would mean a betrayal by the apparent mole they trusted at the top.
But wait—this isn’t the Pfizer, the psychiatric pharmaceutical giant that brought the world Zoloft (side effects include aggression, anxiety, depression, seizures, hallucinations and suicide), Geodon (uncontrolled movements of the face, tongue or body; seizures; vomiting; jaundice; and severe skin reactions leading to death), Pristiq (anxiety, racing heart, hallucinations, reckless behavior and suicide), Xanax (memory problems, addiction, hallucinations and seizures) and Effexor XR (depression, confusion, seizures and suicide), right?
Yes, the outfit that unleashes hell under the banner of help and does so on an industrial-strength conveyor belt of chaos-for-profit.
That Pfizer.
But let’s not call Cavazzoni’s beneficent favoritism of a company with bloody hands “preferential treatment.” It’s so much nicer to call it “friendship.”
Let’s not call it a “conflict of interest” either, even though Cavazzoni’s actions are the dictionary definition of that phrase.
And above all, let’s not call it a quid pro quo, even though she is now guaranteed a “welcome back, Patrizia” party and a beautiful corner office with a view, plus salary and benefits.
Let’s just call it a tearful reunion of old partners in crime.
Our tears. Their crime.
