New York

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On April 1st, 2016, we are at Pfizer because it is representative of the deceptive pharmaceutical industry. We are protesting against their lies and continuous acts of financial greed in their attempts to profit from medicines at the expense patients’ lives and expanding affordable access.

Pfizer gouges prices. In January 2016, Pfizer hiked the price of over 100 medicines, by up to 20%, including treatments for breast cancer, mental health, HIV, epilepsy, prostate cancer, pneumonia, skin and gut infections, acute myeloid leukemia, erectile dysfunction, menopause symptoms, diabetic peripheral neuropathy, fibromyalgia, and heart disease. These price increases deviate from costs of inflation and regularly occur over the years.

Pfizer lies. They claim that R&D for a medication costs over USD 1 billion dollars. Their propaganda deceives the public to justify that they deserve billions of dollars in profit in order to recoup costs. Pfizer uses millions in public funds to develop drugs and needs to open its books to reveal the true R&D costs.

Pfizer steals. Pfizer merged with Irish company Allergan in 2015 to permanently avoid paying up to $35 billion in US taxes. This is one of the largest tax dodges ever. Pfizer extorts money from patients who cannot afford its drugs while evading taxes.

Pfizer kills children. Pfizer has refused to negotiate with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to lower the price of the pneumonia vaccine to $5 per child. The vaccine can save millions of children’s lives, but is too expensive for many developing countries. In 2014 alone, Pfizer made $4.4 billion from vaccine sales. We support MSF and demand Pfizer to disclose the prices they charge all countries for this vaccine.

“The system is not fair, we effectively pay twice for medicines while ‘Big Pharma’ profits. We need a new approach for making drugs for serious and life threatening diseases – having the public invest in the research at the beginning and then pay again for the drugs at the end, while the profit is privatized in the middle – there is something very wrong with that model,” said Mark Harrington of Treatment Action Group.

In the US, we demand:

• Pfizer to reduce the price of its medicines and stop raising prices;

• Pfizer to give children a fair shot and reduce cost for the pneumonia vaccine;

• Pfizer to pay fair taxes and the US Treasury Secretary to block the Pfizer-Allergan merger, on the basis that it is a massive scheme to avoid paying US taxes;

• Congress to oppose trade agreement provisions, such as in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, that benefit Pharma monopolies and further facilitate high pricing, and

• Universal single-payer health care because health is a human right.

For more information, contact:

  > ACT UP New York
  > info@actupny.com
  > Tel: (929) 248-8252 or (954) 482-1421
  > Twitter: @actupny