Pfizer

• 1. Introduction

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  In 2025, a single Pfizer medicine called Eliquis brought in 7.9 billion dollars. That was 13 percent of the company's revenue for the year. Pfizer is an American pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation, and its headquarters sit at The Spiral in Manhattan. It ranks fifth among biomedical companies by revenue, 69th on the Fortune 500 and 73rd on the Forbes Global 2000. In 2025-59 percent of its revenue came from the United States, 5 percent from China and 36 percent from other countries. Yet the firm is also one of the oldest drugmakers in North America. How did it grow from a small chemical business into a giant that develops medicines and vaccines for immunology, oncology, cardiology, endocrinology and neurology? Which products and purchases built it? And what has it been forced to answer for along the way?

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• 2. Brooklyn Beginnings

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  In 1849, two cousins from Ludwigsburg, Germany, started a chemical business in New York. Their names were Charles Pfizer and Charles F. Erhart, and they called the firm Charles Pfizer & Company. They worked from Bartlett Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Their first product was santonin, an antiparasitic drug, and it sold well from the start.

  Growth came later. In the 1880s, the firm's real engine turned out to be citric acid. The profits allowed both cousins to settle in Clinton Hill, a Brooklyn district known for its Gilded Age wealth. Pfizer lived at 295 Washington Avenue, a house that has since been demolished. Erhart lived nearby at 280 Washington Avenue.

  In 1881, the administrative headquarters moved to 81 Maiden Lane in Manhattan. A year later the company expanded to Chicago, Illinois. By 1906, annual sales had passed 3 million dollars. Meanwhile the firm kept buying property around Williamsburg to enlarge its laboratory and factory, and it kept offices on Flushing Avenue until the 1960s.

  The Brooklyn plant itself closed in 2009. By then the surrounding area had fallen into decline in the 1970s and 1980s. The company responded with a partnership with New York City that built housing for low and middle income families. It also refurbished apartment buildings for the homeless and helped found a charter school.

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• 3. From Fungus to Research

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  When World War I cut off Pfizer's supply of calcium citrate from Italy, the company had a problem. It had been importing that compound to make citric acid. So its chemists searched for another route and found a fungus that could ferment sugar into citric acid. By 1919, Pfizer was producing citric acid commercially this way, and the effort left it with deep expertise in fermentation.

  That skill mattered again in World War II. The company applied it to the deep-submergence mass production of penicillin, to treat wounded Allied soldiers. To improve penicillin yields, it also ran a global soil collection program that ended up with 135,000 samples. On the 2nd of June 1942, Pfizer incorporated under the Delaware General Corporation Law.

  After the war, penicillin prices fell, and Pfizer went looking for antibiotics with better profit potential. In 1950 it discovered oxytetracycline. That discovery changed Pfizer from a maker of fine chemicals into a research-based pharmaceutical company. The firm then built a drug discovery program around in vitro synthesis, to complement its fermentation work.

  In 1959 came an animal health division, based on a 700 acre farm and research facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. By the 1950s the company had offices in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom. In 1960 it moved its medical research laboratories out of New York City to a new facility in Groton, Connecticut.

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• 4. Blockbuster Medicines

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  Feldene, an anti-inflammatory drug whose chemical name is piroxicam, launched in 1980. It became the first Pfizer product to reach 1 billion dollars in revenue. The next year, regulators approved Diflucan, the first oral treatment for severe fungal infections. In 1986, Pfizer bought the worldwide rights to the antibiotic Zithromax from the company Pliva.

  Then came a drug with an unlikely origin. In 1989, Pfizer scientists Peter Dunn and Albert Wood created sildenafil, which the company called Viagra, to treat high blood pressure and angina. It was patented in the United Kingdom in 1991 as a heart medication. Early trials showed it did not work for heart disease. But volunteers in those trials reported increased erections several days after taking it. The United States patent arrived in 1996, and the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug in March 1998. That December, Pfizer hired Bob Dole as its spokesperson. Its patents expired in 2020.

  In 1991, Pfizer began marketing Zoloft, an antidepressant of the SSRI class. Chemists Kenneth Koe and Willard Welch had developed it nine years earlier. In 2005, the year before it turned generic, sales topped 3 billion dollars, and more than 100 million people had been treated with it. In 1996, Pfizer also won approval for the blood pressure drug Norvasc. Its partner Eisai won approval for Aricept, an Alzheimer's treatment.

  The biggest of all was Lipitor. In 1997, Pfizer agreed to co-market the cholesterol-lowering statin with Warner-Lambert. It was only the fifth statin developed, but trials showed it cut LDL-C more sharply than the others. By the time its patent expired in 2011, Lipitor had earned roughly 125 billion dollars over 14.5 years, making it the best-selling drug ever.

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• 5. The Deal Machine

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  In June 2000, Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert outright for 116 billion dollars. Federal Trade Commission conditions forced it to part with some minor products. These included RID, a head lice shampoo sold to Bayer, and the antidepressant Celexa, which competed with Zoloft. At the time, the result was the second-largest pharmaceutical company in the world.

  In 2003, Pfizer merged with Pharmacia, which brought in Searle and SUGEN. Searle had developed the antibiotic Flagyl and the anti-inflammatory Celebrex. SUGEN worked on protein kinase inhibitors, and Pfizer shut its facility that year, with more than 300 jobs lost. Several programs survived, though. One became the cancer drug sunitinib, approved in January 2006. Another, toceranib, was approved for cancer in dogs.

  On the 15th of October 2009, Pfizer acquired Wyeth for 68 billion dollars in cash and stock, including assumed debt. That made it the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Wyeth's gift was a pneumococcal vaccine. Its original 7-valent version, developed in February 2000, cut invasive pneumococcal infections among American children under 5 by 75 percent. Pfizer launched the improved Prevnar 13 in 2010, covering 13 bacterial variants. By 2012, the infection rate in that age group had fallen by another 50 percent. In 2025, Prevnar earned 6.5 billion dollars.

  More purchases followed. King Pharmaceuticals, maker of emergency injectables such as the EpiPen, cost 3.6 billion dollars in March 2011. In September 2015, Pfizer paid 17 billion dollars for Hospira, the world's largest producer of generic injectable drugs. On the 23rd of November 2015, it announced a planned 160 billion dollar merger with Allergan, the largest pharmaceutical deal ever. The structure would have kept Allergan's Irish home, where corporation tax was 12.5 percent. On the 6th of April 2016, the deal collapsed after the Obama administration and the Treasury introduced rules to limit corporate inversions.

  Divestitures also reshaped the company. Its animal health unit, Zoetis, raised 2.2 billion dollars in a public offering on the 1st of February 2013. In November 2020, Pfizer merged its Upjohn business with Mylan to form Viatris. The largest cancer purchase came in December 2023, when Pfizer paid 43 billion dollars for Seagen, a pioneer of antibody-drug conjugates.

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• 6. The Vaccine Race

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  In August 2018, Pfizer signed an agreement with BioNTech to work on mRNA-based influenza vaccines. That partnership became the foundation for the pandemic effort. When the scale of COVID-19 became clear, the two companies set out to develop mRNA vaccine candidates. By then, Albert Bourla had been chief executive since the 1st of January 2019, taking over from his mentor Ian Read.

  Pfizer made an unusual choice. Unlike many competitors, it took no initial research money from the American Operation Warp Speed program. It invested roughly 2 billion dollars of its own funds instead. Bourla later explained his reasoning: "when you get money from someone that always comes with strings. They want to see how we are going to progress, what type of moves you are going to do. They want reports. And also, I wanted to keep Pfizer out of politics, by the way."

  In May 2020, the company began testing four vaccine variations. They used lipid nanoparticle technology supplied by the Canadian firm Acuitas Therapeutics. In July, two of the four candidates won fast track designation from the FDA. Phase two and three testing on 30,000 people began in the last week of that month. The United States government agreed to pay 1.95 billion dollars for 100 million doses. In September, the EU agreed to an initial 200 million doses, with an option for 100 million more.

  On the 9th of November 2020, Pfizer announced that the vaccine, tested on 43,500 people, was 90 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19. A week later the figure rose to 95 percent, described as "really a spectacular number". Regulators in several countries approved emergency use in November and December 2020. In 2025, the vaccine, sold as Comirnaty, still earned 4.4 billion dollars.

  In November 2021, Pfizer launched the oral antiviral Paxlovid. In May 2022, patients reported symptoms returning after the five-day course. The FDA reviewed more of the trial data and left its recommendations unchanged. Joe Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci both reportedly experienced this rebound.

  Scrutiny followed the success. In November 2021, The BMJ published claims from Brook Jackson, a regional director at Ventavia Research Group, a subcontractor on the pivotal trial. She said Ventavia falsified data, unblinded patients and was slow to follow up on adverse events. She emailed the FDA and was fired the same day. The European Medicines Agency replied that the problems did not undermine the trial data. Science-Based Medicine noted that Ventavia ran just three of the 153 trial sites.

  On the 10th of October 2022, Pfizer executive Janine Small told a European Parliament committee that the vaccine had not been tested for stopping transmission before release. Dutch MEP Rob Roos called that admission scandalous. His own statements were later described as misleading.

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• 7. Legal Reckonings

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  In September 2009, Pfizer pleaded guilty to illegally marketing the arthritis drug Bextra. The settlement came to 2.3 billion dollars, the largest health care fraud settlement at that time. Bextra had been pulled from the market in 2005, and Pfizer had promoted it for uses and doses the FDA declined to approve over safety concerns. The criminal fine of 1.195 billion dollars was the largest ever assessed in the United States. It was Pfizer's fourth such settlement in a decade. As part of a corporate integrity agreement, the company had to publish a searchable database of its payments to physicians.

  An earlier case came through Warner-Lambert. In 2004, it paid 430 million dollars over the promotion of gabapentin for pain, psychiatric conditions and migraine, none of which the FDA had approved. It was the first off-label promotion case successfully brought under the False Claims Act.

  Some cases reached back decades. The Quigley Company sold asbestos-containing insulation until the early 1970s, and Pfizer bought it in 1968. In June 2013, a settlement committed Pfizer to pay 964 million dollars in total. In 1994, Pfizer paid 10.75 million dollars to settle claims that it had lied to win approval for the Bjork-Shiley heart valve. Approximately 500 people died when those valves fractured.

  The darkest case began in 1996 in Kano, Nigeria. Amid outbreaks of measles, cholera and bacterial meningitis, Pfizer staff gave an experimental antibiotic, trovafloxacin, to approximately 200 children. Local officials reported that more than fifty children died, and many others were left blind, deaf, paralyzed or brain damaged. The lawsuits alleged that parents were not told of the risks, or of a conventional treatment that Doctors without Borders was offering at the same site. Pfizer disputed this. In a 2007 statement, it said the drug had been safely tested in five thousand patients, and that meningitis, not the drug, caused the harm. In June 2010, the US Supreme Court rejected Pfizer's appeal and let the Nigerian families' lawsuits proceed. The cases ended in an out-of-court settlement that included 30 million dollars for healthcare initiatives in Kano, with payouts beginning in 2011.

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• 8. Setbacks and New Bets

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  On the 3rd of December 2006, Pfizer stopped development of torcetrapib, a drug meant to raise HDL cholesterol. In a Phase III trial of 15,000 patients, deaths exceeded expectations. Patients taking it with Lipitor suffered 82 deaths, 60 percent more than the 52 among those taking Lipitor alone. The company lost nearly 1 billion dollars on the failed drug, and its stock fell 11 percent that day.

  In January 2018, Pfizer announced it would end its research into Alzheimer's disease and Parkinsonism. About 300 researchers were expected to lose their jobs. Other pressures came from regulators and rivals. In July 2022, British antitrust authorities fined Pfizer 63 million pounds over the epilepsy drug Epanutin. They said the company took advantage of de-branding the drug to raise its price unchecked. A month later, Moderna announced it would sue Pfizer and BioNTech for infringing its mRNA patents. In May 2024, the European Patent Office upheld one of the two patents asserted.

  Since then, the company has made fresh bets. In February 2024, it expanded an agreement with Saama to use artificial intelligence across its research and development portfolio. In July 2024, it advanced danuglipron, an oral obesity drug. It also announced a partnership with Flagship Pioneering to co-develop 10 drug candidates, each side committing 50 million dollars upfront.

  In March 2025, Pfizer sold its entire stake in Haleon for 3.24 billion dollars. In October 2025, it struck an agreement with the Trump administration to voluntarily lower US drug prices. In return it won a three-year exemption from pharmaceutical-specific tariffs, and in turn pledged 70 billion dollars to US manufacturing and research. A month later, Pfizer acquired Metsera, a deal that could exceed 10 billion dollars, to deepen its push into weight-loss drugs.

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