Phooey Pfizer!
“Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve. Consistent with these values, Pfizer strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment.”
Ponder carefully the choice of words in that statement.
The Guardian and the BBC were both delighted by the opportunity to indulge in their favourite sport of USA-bashing – they trotted out their tales of botched executions.
Dennis Maguire who died ‘struggling, his fist clenching, making all these horrible, horrible nosies’ – no mention of the death of his victim; Joy Stewart, eight months pregnant when he raped and murdered her – presumably not a peaceful death for her.
Or Christopher Newton – liberals were appalled when it took over two hours to get an IV needle into this obese Ohio murderer – so long that he requested (and got) a ‘break to go to the toilet’.
These cases are frequently quoted to illustrate the pernicious inhumanity of the US in carrying out the death penalty, and much hand wringing occurred after Pfizer’s announcement, muting the anti-death penalty activists – would murderers now be subjected to the death penalty or the electric chair?
“We see now the pharmaceutical industry does not want its products used in executions,” she said. “The medical field does not want to be involved in executions, the nursing field does not want to be involved in executions, the paramedic field does not want to be involved in executions. No medical groups want anything to do with this.
Pfizer was universally accorded the moral high ground for a decision that completed the agreement by all 20 American and European drug companies not to sell the concoction of Pancuronium Bromide, Potassium Chloride, and Sodium Thiopental to inhumane brutes who carelessly inject them into murderers and rapists and cause them a horrifying, undignified, prolonged and agonising death that no decent company would want to be associated with…
Indeed, they wouldn’t. Not when they have a growth market in the European states for the same drugs – for use in Euthanasia clinics that apparently deliver a calm, humane, painless, speedy and well deserved ‘end of life’ for those who request it…as promoted through rose tinted lenses by the BBC who happily filmed Simon Binner as he met his maker in the most humane way possible…
Courtesy of the same cocktail of drugs made by the same select group of drug manufacturers.
Something is wrong here – either these companies have been supply duff batches of drugs to the US prisons, or not all who cheerfully trip off to the dismal Dignitas and similar clinics end their life in a way that the BBC would be happy to use to promote euthanasia.
Pfizer strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment.
They haven’t stopped making them – nor supplying them to selected customers. With the current marketing push to persuade us all that we would prefer euthanasia to old age or illness, they just don’t want their product associated with anything negative, like criminals and death penalties.
Euthanasia is the new ‘soft’ market for them.
Moral high ground? Phooey!
- Robert Edwards
May 15, 2016 at 3:06 pm - Joe Public
May 15, 2016 at 3:24 pm -
Well spotted, Anna.
One wonders if Pfizer have a medicinal cure for a jaundiced view of the main stream media?
Whatever, make use of their most famous product, and ‘keep it up’.
- Jim
May 15, 2016 at 3:24 pm -
I’m no expert and don’t want to judge. But I also wonder whether these companies also have the same concern over their products used in the abortion industry, especially as practiced by Planned Parenthood in USA.
- Stewart Cowan
May 15, 2016 at 5:06 pm -
I was going to bring up the same issue, Jim. A few murderers on death row v. tens of millions of killings in the womb every year. Abortion – the murder which the mainstream dare not speak its name for fear of pro-deathers waking up to the reality of what they are defending.
- David
May 15, 2016 at 5:10 pm -
Do you know the world has over 7 billion people, and the world population is about to double? http://www.worldometers.info/watch/world-population/
- Stewart Cowan
May 15, 2016 at 5:19 pm -
Did you know that the UK is one of the more densely populated countries, yet less than 2% is built on, including roads?
What is your point, David? That unborn children keep having to be murdered. or do you have a valid point which exhibits a sense of humanity?
- David
May 15, 2016 at 5:29 pm -
It is inhumane to keep bringing children into the World, when there is no education for them, no health care, no housing, and no jobs.
You can’t just cover the UK in housing estates, you need land to grow food, water, hospitals, schools, etc. Why bring unwanted children into an overcrowded world, where they are doomed to suffer. I thing women should decide if they want an abortion, not men, or religions run by men.- Stewart Cowan
May 15, 2016 at 5:46 pm -
David – you are one indoctrinated individual, parroting the sick, twisted rhetoric of the social engineers.
How many people who had poor, unhappy childhoods wished they had been aborted? I bet not many – but you think that the most callous form of murder on the planet – cowardly and inhuman – is the answer to the world’s problems.
It IS one of the world’s problems.
If it makes you feel happier, eugenicists, like Bill and Melinda Gates, are spreading their population reduction strategies in the Third World. Add to this the dangerously low fertility rates in places like Japan and Korea and the population will soon be falling.
“I thing women should decide if they want an abortion, not men.”
A male feminist on top of everything else. How depressing. A ‘man’ who would let a woman murder his child.
Go away and get reprogrammed into reality, please.
- The Blocked Dwarf
May 15, 2016 at 6:12 pm -
It is inhumane to keep bringing children into the World, when there is no education for them, no health care, no housing, and no jobs.
and just how many of the great men and women of history-even recent history- would have not been born, and how poor would humanity now be, if their parents had taken that view?
As I put it to someone thinking of an abortion fairly recently ‘it will never be the right time to have a child, you will never have enough money to afford children-unless your surname is Gates. The world will never be a place you would want to bring up children in and if it was, the moment you gave birth then it would no longer be. Having a baby is like much else in life, you pays yer money and yer makes yer choice THEN you make it the RIGHT choice’
I am please to report the girl, for a girl it was, didn’t abort and surprise surprise her ‘life’ didn’t end, she probably has a materially better life than before.
- Stewart Cowan
May 15, 2016 at 10:17 pm -
Wise words indeed, Mr Dwarf.
- Stewart Cowan
- Stewart Cowan
- David
- Dave C
May 16, 2016 at 6:11 pm -
7 billion? Really? The UK is one of the most regulated and measured countries in the world, and they can’t be sure exactly how many people live here. It could be anything between 65 million (the official census figure- flawed because it only counts the forms that are filled in. Illegals don’t fill in forms); or 80 million (based on the amount of food sold in supermarkets and the amount of human effluent passing through the sewers).
If the UK’s figure is a best estimate- what about all those third world countries where they never count the population? Where do they get those figures from? Even the UN doesn’t know the total.
Sorry but these figures are only guesswork. They could be much higher- but they could be much lower.
No-one knows. Not even you sir.- Moor Larkin
May 16, 2016 at 6:46 pm -
Statistics. They’re everywhere.
https://twitter.com/moor_facts/status/730676226470334464
- Moor Larkin
- Stewart Cowan
- David
- Stewart Cowan
- Jim
May 15, 2016 at 3:26 pm -
Good post by the way.
- Machiii
May 15, 2016 at 3:49 pm -
Great post
- David
May 15, 2016 at 4:27 pm -
I have never approved of the death penalty, from the time I found out about it, when I was ten.
I have never approved of euthanasia, probably from about the same age when my parents put down one of my pets.
But then I have never approved of mainstream medicine, again since the age of ten when I first started buying vitamin tablets, and using herbs.
Pfizer is one of those greedy pharmaceutical companies, who have their own clinics, doctors, etc, and decide the protocols for testing their own drugs. Surprise, over 80% of drugs tested are found useful.- The Blocked Dwarf
May 15, 2016 at 4:57 pm -
You were the sort of 10 year old whose peers voted the ‘Child mostly likely to be brutally murdered before reaching the age of majority’ .
- David
May 15, 2016 at 5:01 pm -
I was in extreme danger from the age of 8, going off with strangers to their houses regularly. However, as you see, I somehow survived.
- David
- The Blocked Dwarf
- Mudplugger
May 15, 2016 at 4:46 pm -
And yet ……… the most profitable shop on the high street, as measured by profit per square foot of shelf-space, is Holland & Barrett, those cuddly purveyors of herbal nonsenses to the terminally gullible. Funny old world.
- David
May 15, 2016 at 4:51 pm -
I wouldn’t call the Queen, and Prince Philip, ‘terminally gullible’, still working in their 90s, when most of their subjects, if they are still going, are in care homes. They only use, ‘alternative medicine’, (except for operations), I have to put that in, to stop the peanut gallery from exploding.
- David
- binao
May 15, 2016 at 4:53 pm -
Lovely exposure of the hypocrisy of the handwringers.
I don’t have much of a problem with the death sentence providing it’s accompanied with a pardon after execution just in case…
I’d thought I was uncomfortable with the idea of people willing to do the deed, but when I think of what we ask our armed forces to do the balance shifts.
I don’t suppose the makers of bullets are going to refuse to sell them for shooting reluctant live targets? - Fat Steve
May 15, 2016 at 5:38 pm -
There is a difference Anna
Efficacy of the drug is a seperate issue , the use to which it is put is another, The drug causes death in both cases but the intents when they are administered are distinguishable. Whatever my personal view on the Death Sentence (or Abortion) it is perfectly justifiable to suggest one does not wish a product one produces to be used for a purpose that one does not agree with …..or frankly that associates it negatively when its use may (I stress may) be positive and of use to some- Mudplugger
May 15, 2016 at 9:22 pm -
A similar case arises with a hammer – you can use the same hammer to make a thing or break a thing, but the retailer has no say on the purpose for which you purchased the hammer: it’s a hammer, it’s yours, you will choose how you use it (lawfully) post-purchase.
We have the nonsense of stores declining to sell knives to certain types of customer, while all our kitchens at home are full of sharp knives with which a massacre could easily be undertaken.
Now we have Pfizer doing a ‘Tesco’, in order simply to pretend that their products will not be used deliberately to kill people, except they are being used deliberately to kill some people. Corporate hipocrisy – if they feel so strongly about it, stop making the product and banking the profit from it, otherwise just be honest about it.- Fat Steve
May 15, 2016 at 10:15 pm -
Guns don’t kill people…… and neither do Pfiser drugs ….its people that kill other people with them.
History is littered with stories of people setting out with good intent (I make no value judgement on Euthanasia but some countries allow it and presumably if it is allowed then it should be administered in a humane manner if indeed Euthanasia is a humane concept) to make things to help others but they end up being used for a different less savoury purpose ……if it were otherwise there would be no law of unexpected consequences. - Mrs Grimble
May 16, 2016 at 2:41 am -
And it’s the same with Mifepristone, Pfizer’s “abortion drug”. All it does is induce uterine contractions, so its also used to bring on labour, and expel the placenta after birth.
- Fat Steve
May 16, 2016 at 10:45 am -
@Mrs Grimble
Perhaps one of the most interesting of instances of the law of unexpected consequences and good intent was the invention of the birth control pill by Dr John Rock, a devout Catholic who sought to reconcile Catholic doctrine and contraception. One must form ones own view on whether he did so or not though the Catholic Church clearly thought he did not though I incline to a different view
An introduction to the issue is contained in the link below
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/03/13/john-rocks-error-2
An extract is
In hindsight, it is possible to see the opportunity that Rock missed. If he had known what we know now and had talked about the Pill not as a contraceptive but as a cancer drug—not as a drug to prevent life but as one that would save life—the church might well have said yes.
I suggest the Pfizer drug is sold to ease suffering rather than cause it.
The same might be said for the invention of Heroin- The Blocked Dwarf
May 16, 2016 at 1:29 pm -
the Pill not as a contraceptive but as a cancer drug
Is it still ‘true’ that nuns don’t get cervical cancer ? I also recall reading of a link between breast cancer and The Pill. If that’s true then Dr Rock not only managed to single handedly destroy (alright ‘destroy’ is a bit harsh , let’s go with ‘redefine’) Western society and ‘Jobs for life’ (people forget that modern mass unemployment started when the potential workforce doubled almost overnight) but also has a body count to rival a despotic dictator or two.
- Fat Steve
May 16, 2016 at 2:09 pm -
An interesting story about someone who initially took a view on the moral neutrality of science and then changed his mind
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/us/22nathanson.html?_r=0 - windsock
May 16, 2016 at 2:25 pm -
Cervical cancer can be caused by Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), There is now a vaccine against certain strains of HPV that is being given to schoolgirls around age 13 throughout the UK, with the aim of eradicating the “reservoir” of the virus in the population, the idea being if it doesn’t exist in girls, the boys won’t catch it.
Except those boys who have sex with girls from outside the UK who have not been vaccinated. Or boys who experiment with older women. Or boys who experiment with older men. Or boys who experiment with boys. HPV is becoming a hot button issue for gay men – the number of cases of men with HPV that is causing anal cancer analogous o cervical cancer is rising rapidly, especially among those co-infected with HIV.
I can’t WAIT for the first boy who would be of an age to receive the vaccine to sue the government under equality laws if he has caught HPV when it could have been prevented. (Boys can be privately vaccinated of course, at about £120 per shot each for a course of 3 shots.)
- windsock
May 16, 2016 at 2:27 pm -
And because two links in a comment would have sent me to moderation:
- windsock
- Fat Steve
- The Blocked Dwarf
- Fat Steve
- Fat Steve
- Mudplugger
- Lord T
May 15, 2016 at 7:01 pm -
I don’t actually agree with the death penalty but felt I had to comment about this.
If they don’t have any drugs to do it the way it is done in Switzerland then I’m sure that the victims families would be more than happy to make sure these people died in the way that their loved ones went. I’m pretty sure non of them went in a SJW approved way but they are happy to ignore that.
- Adrian
May 15, 2016 at 8:57 pm -
Don’t approve of the death penalty and glad we don’t have it in the uk. The trouble with with holding the drugs for executions is that the US may revert to more traditional methods such as the electric chair. In case you think its quick do a search on liveleak and you can see some complete film footage shot in the 70s—‘it’s not nice.
That said the US has a huge gun problem and life is cheap especially for the poor. Just watch “the first 48” filmed with real homicide departments to see how bad it is, people get shot over 30 dollars - Jim
May 15, 2016 at 9:24 pm -
Regardless of people’s views on capital punishment, the main issue is how big business will continue to be a major partner in the social engineering of the masses and how it colludes with and capitalises on our growing relativist morality.
No need to worry about capital punishment or euthanasia. We are all killing ourselves simply through ignorance and a loss of essential survival skills anyway. - Gordo
May 16, 2016 at 1:40 am -
One imagines if the death penalty was to be applied for racism or homophobia or transphobia Pfizer would be happy to supply the dose, and for antisemitism they would supply it for free!
- Bill Sticker
May 16, 2016 at 4:47 am -
Why is it always the US of A that certain people bang on about when it comes to the death penalty? There are far worse countries. With far worse methods. China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran to name but three.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/death-sentences-and-executions-2014
- JuliaM
May 17, 2016 at 2:51 pm -
I dunno, assuming the swordsman is skilled, Saudi Arabia must have the most humane one going.
- JuliaM
- Major Bonkers
May 16, 2016 at 6:40 am -
I imagine that on the packet the manufacturer will claim that this treatment, while suitable for voluntary euthanasia, is unsuitable for involuntary euthanasia.
- windsock
May 16, 2016 at 8:02 am -
Yeah, but… know your market.
Phizer will follow.
- Gaye Dalton
May 16, 2016 at 10:28 am -
Just a practical footnote, they use the same drugs to euthanise dogs here. I had a friend who did it in the local pound, because the alternative was an abbatoir vet who was too rough with the dogs. She was quite clear that “it is not very pretty”. But surgery isn’t very pretty either…doesn’t mean you feel a thing. The throes of death bring a lot of involuntary, totally unconscious, reflexes and noises.
Too many people react to what they can see with a jerk of the knee, and ignore what they cannot see.
There is a video interview with a Saudi executioner online. It seems genuine (there are also a few spoofs around). He is a big calm man with a an oddly reassuring manner. when asked if he felt compassion he answered:
“If I felt compassion, they would suffer. When there is compassion in the heart the hand fails”.The death penalty, in any form, for any reason, utterly revolts me, always has, always will, but when you get right down to it, the horror, for the condemned, is not in what the death looks like, but in the waiting for it as inevitable. Even so, I am not sure that a quick, quiet death is not more humane than caging someone like Ian Brady in solitude for life because there was no way he could be let out, even into the general population. (Even he believes he should never be let out and has repeatedly asked to be allowed to die) The man is, beyond question a monster, but what purpose is served by 50 odd years of intolerable mental and emotional torture on the public purse?
I feel euthanasia should be a right, but I would never trust any society not to abuse that right, and my abject horror of the death penalty has, I suspect, similar roots. Nothing to do with how pretty it does, or does not look when the camera shuts off at all.
I very much doubt if voluntary euthanasia will ever be a massed market worth fighting for, but I can see good reason not to terrorise those who have the right to seek it with lurid accounts of what were ugly, but probably painless, deaths from the same drugs used in executions.
- Moor Larkin
May 17, 2016 at 9:58 am -
The butcher with the sharpest knife . . . has the warmest heart.
Insofar as despatching incontovertibe monsters goes, the new godless liberals consider it a duty to keep “bad folks” alive, so that they can be made to suffer. This also explains the current fervour for locking up doddery old men, which otherwise seems pointless. There’s often a hope that they will be extensively butt-raped as well, on behalf of society, queerly enough. They are certainly often savagely attacked by the representatives of the liberals on the inside – hence the solitary confinement on the grounds of humane treatment. http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/are-we-not-men.html
- Gaye Dalton
May 17, 2016 at 7:07 pm -
Executioner reckoned the biggest perk was when he went to ask the family of the victim for mercy the night before execution (part of his job) and they agreed to it…I’d say there are worse ways to go…the famed “Swordsman of Calais” must have been like that.
Deliberately torturing people for years is pretty disgusting…whatever they have done…
- Gaye Dalton
- Moor Larkin
- Dave C
May 16, 2016 at 6:18 pm -
On the news that someone is calling for a change in the law to allow abortions at any time,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3590774/Horror-plan-legalise-terminations-birth-midwives-chief-calls-end-time-limit-abortions.html
I recall a short story from sci-fi author Philip K Dick called The Pre-persons, published in 1974.
http://prolife.org.nz/the-pre-persons-phillip-k-dick/
Where do we draw the line?- Fat Steve
May 16, 2016 at 9:32 pm -
Thanks for the link to the short story ……a brilliant concept along the lines of Swift’s A Modest Proposal.
Worth looking at this article to see the tricks employed by the pro choice lobby from the horses mouth
http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/abortion/confessions-of-an-ex-abortionist.html
But the nub of the confabulation of the issue is perhaps best summarised by
First, they promoted the idea that abortion is a medical issue, not a moral one. This required persuading people of the rather obvious falsehood that a normal pregnancy is a natural and healthy condition if the mother wants her baby, and a disease if she does not. - Nessie
May 17, 2016 at 3:07 pm -
We wouldn’t even think of killing an infant or a baby after birth, and yet we’re so desensitised to the idea of abortion that it’s now not acceptable to criticise it any more. It seems that, according to society, a couple of hours makes the difference in whether a baby is a human or not. I can only come to the conclusion that we’re just playing a deadly game of peek-a-boo with our kids – if we can’t see it, it’s not real, and we can kill it in the name of women’s rights.
- Fat Steve
- Penseivat
May 16, 2016 at 8:33 pm -
There are numerous alternatives to the withdrawal of various drugs on ethical grounds, though linking great pharma and ethics in the same sentence reeks of hypocrisy. The good old’ USA can choose many methods of capital punishment and also show it’s willingness to embrace diversity. The subject can be given 50 lashes with a bamboo cane and then beheaded (very popular in Saudi Arabia); then there is being slowly hung from a crane in the market place while the locals gather round, eating local delicacies, as used in other less liberal middle eastern countries; the Chinese have an ages old method of having hundreds of starving budgeriegars nibble on one’s tied extremities; South American countries have a passion for firing squads while eastern Europe apparently favours the flat surface placed on top of the subject and heavy stones placed on top. All of these methods do not need the use of extremely expensive products produced by ‘ethical’ (sorry, I’ve just started laughing) chemical companies. There is, however, the comparatively humane method of hanging, where the neck of the subject is broken, causing no pain and instantaneous death. But where’s the fun in that?
- Alexander Baron
May 16, 2016 at 9:07 pm -
I’ve always said and still do that if the death penalty were reserved for the worst of the worst there would be no real controversy over it. I’m sure most people find it obscene that Lawrence Bittaker was allowed to sue for being served “a broken cookie”, even more so seeing David McGreavy walking the streets of Liverpool and the prospect of Colin Pitchfork eventually doing the same.
- JuliaM
May 17, 2016 at 2:47 pm -
How do Pfizer feel about their products being prescribed to Death Row inmates, for whatever afflictions they might have or develop..?
I guess they’ll be just fine with that…
- Davrod
May 20, 2016 at 3:04 pm -
I thought the problem with the death sentence was the inability of the justice system to produce reliably correct judgments? Not very fair to execute the innocent after all. The issue with lethal injections is, as far as I know, that the technicians performing the execution often botch them and cause intense suffering (yes monsters etc, but if you want them to suffer then legislate for punishment by torture, admit that you value their suffering and get your jollies that way, don’t hide behind the potential for a botched execution). This is not so much the case at dignitas.
as for abortion, nice shoehorning of an unrelated issue there.
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