I Love A Corporate Crisis!

Visitors know I'm something of a conoisseur of corporate crises, especially ones that are clumsily mishandled and stem from dysfunctional corporate culture, although that last may be a redundancy. Pfizer has already been suffering from bad publicity in the release of Twitter files and Wednesday's Babylon Bee story:

NEW YORK, NY — Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has unveiled their new mascot, an adorable glob of platelets who goes by the name "Clotty".

"See? Blood clots aren't scary!" said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla as a smiling Clotty danced onto the stage. "Welcome to Pfizer, Clotty! Let's get one of these little guys into every home in America!"

While Pfizer initially pushed back against evidence tying the vaccine to blood clots, the company has decided to instead embrace it. "We are so excited for Clotty to help us put a friendly face on heart attacks and strokes," said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. "Every new COVID booster will now come with a plush Clotty doll you can take to the hospital when you inevitably get admitted with a massive embolus. You'll love squeezing Clotty while they wheel you into the cath lab! Thanks, Clotty!"

The new mascot's reception has thus far been overwhelmingly positive, with Clotty paraphernalia already showing up in several politicians' offices. "Gosh darn it, I love the little guy," said Senator Elizabeth Warren, sporting a Clotty t-shirt as she adjusted a picture of her and Clotty. "Every child in America should be so lucky as to have one of these precious little blood clots. I will continue to do everything in my power to make it happen."

The last thing it needed was release of the Project Veritas video in which

A research director with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said the corporation is secretly exploring intentionally creating mutations of the COVID virus to “preemptively develop new vaccines,” and said COVID “is going to be a cash cow for us,” in the latest undercover video by Project Veritas.

In the video released yesterday, Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planner, says, “One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create – preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna’ do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine – no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses.”

Confronted by Project Veritas about his statements, Walker then becomes hysterical and insists, “I was on a third date with a guy, and like normal men, you lie to impress a date.” Given a day's reflection on the circumstances, several things strike me. The first is that under normal corporate policies, Walker would be at minimum placed on leave pending investigation, but following any such serious investigation, he'd be fired.

For instance, as one commenter pointed out in one discussion, at his level, he has certainly signed a non-disclosure agreement, which he very visibly violated on the excuse that he was trying to impress a date. The second is that he identified himself as a Pfizer employee and then proceeded to damage the company's reputation via bizarre conduct. While Pfizer would be obligated to preserve the confidentiality of personnel actions in any such case, a corporate statement that Walker was not authorized to blah blah blah would be appropriate -- but so far, nothing like this has happened.

No commenter I've seen has dared to mention one of the most obvious features of the whole episode, which is that Walker's expression and mannerisms are stereotypically effeminate, and this becomes more intense as his hysteria mounts when Project Veritas confronts him with his statements. This, and the fact he appears to be of African-American heritage, will place him in a protected class, and it's likely that Pfizer won't make any immediate adverse personnel action, but I would estimate that his career is now effectively sidetracked.

Except that he's probably already been in what the Japanese call a window seat, a job without even token duties that's maintained because the company feels obligated not to lay people off or fire them. This blogger suggested "Dr. Walker probably isn’t a lab scientist doing the 'directed evolution' work," and I agree. But what that does say is that he's more likely always been one of those quasi-workers like the ones recently laid off from Twitter and Google who posted TikTok videos about their meditation rooms and smoothie bars only to be caught in a mass layoff days later.

In other words, he's a member of the entitled gentry class, maintained almost as a status symbol at a certain corporate level. Big Tech is now being forced to lay these people off, but Big Pharma, grown rich and fat most recently from the COVID con, hasn't been forced to do that, at least not yet, and maybe not for the foreseeable future. Days late, Pfizer has so far made only a token response:

New York, N.Y., January 27, 2023 – Allegations have recently been made related to gain of function and directed evolution research at Pfizer and the company would like to set the record straight.

In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research. Working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.

This story comments,

[I]t seems pretty clear, at least in my view, that Pfizer isn’t doing what it’s doing because they fear future variants, and with so many people already having been infected, the efficacy of more and more boosters remains in doubt anyway. COVID-19 vaccines and antivirals are what make Pfizer billions of dollars, and they have every incentive to keep shoving boosters out while insisting they are needed because of “variants.”

Their statement isn’t going to convince anyone on the fence. It’s obfuscatory and confusing at best, and given Pfizer’s history of misleading the public, there’s no reason to take the company’s word for anything.

For now, what's implicit in Walker's conduct and Pfizer's non-reponse to it is that Pfizer so far thinks it's rich enough, and its advertising dollars are so important to media, that it can simply tough its way through this and all other crises.

Nevertheless, the Republicans have the House, and firebrand members are already threatening investigations, including Reps Ronny Jackson and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

We'll see.