How does They Knew verify pharmaceutical industry claims?

Claims are verified using court documents from pharmaceutical litigation, FDA inspection reports, clinical trial data, peer-reviewed research, congressional testimony, and internal company communications obtained through discovery or whistleblower disclosures.

Does this category include anti-vaccine claims?

This category documents pharmaceutical industry conduct backed by evidence, including documented cases of adverse event suppression or regulatory manipulation. It does not host unsubstantiated anti-vaccine claims. Each entry requires primary source documentation.

What role do whistleblowers play in exposing pharmaceutical fraud?

Whistleblowers are critical. The False Claims Act's qui tam provisions allow pharmaceutical employees to file lawsuits on behalf of the government, often revealing fraud that would otherwise remain hidden. Major settlements involving companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson originated from whistleblower disclosures.

How much have pharmaceutical companies paid in fraud settlements?

Major pharmaceutical companies have paid over $35 billion in fraud settlements since 2000, covering off-label marketing, kickbacks to physicians, suppression of safety data, and false claims submitted to government healthcare programs. Despite these amounts, they often represent a fraction of the revenue generated by the products in question.

Health & Pharma Cover-Ups Proven True — 116 Documented Claims

The pharmaceutical industry has repeatedly demonstrated that profit incentives and public health outcomes are not naturally aligned. When a drug generates billions in annual revenue, the institutional pressure to suppress evidence of harm is enormous — and the documented record shows that companies routinely yield to that pressure.

The opioid crisis is the defining pharmaceutical scandal of the twenty-first century. Purdue Pharma's promotion of OxyContin was built on a specific lie: that the drug's time-release formulation made it less addictive than other opioids. Internal documents revealed during litigation showed the company knew this wasn't true. Sales representatives were trained to tell doctors that the risk of addiction was "less than 1 percent" — a claim based on a misrepresented letter to the editor in a medical journal, not rigorous clinical data. The result was an epidemic that has killed over 500,000 Americans and continues to claim approximately 80,000 lives per year.

Merck's handling of Vioxx demonstrated how far a company will go to protect a blockbuster drug. Internal studies showed elevated cardiovascular risks years before the drug was withdrawn from the market in 2004. Merck's own research showed a threefold increase in heart attacks among Vioxx users compared to naproxen. Rather than disclose this, the company designed studies to minimize the apparent risk and pressured researchers who raised concerns. An estimated 27,785 heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths were attributed to the drug before its withdrawal.

The suppression of generic drug competition represents another form of pharmaceutical deception. Pay-for-delay agreements, where brand-name manufacturers pay generic companies to keep cheaper alternatives off the market, cost American consumers an estimated $3.5 billion per year. The practice was widespread for decades before regulatory and legal challenges began to address it.

Psychiatric medication trials have their own history of selective disclosure. Studies showing that certain SSRIs were no more effective than placebo for mild to moderate depression were suppressed while positive results were published. The practice of publication bias — only releasing favorable trial results — has been documented across the pharmaceutical industry and distorts the evidence base that doctors rely on for prescribing decisions.

The FDA's regulatory capture is part of this story. The agency that is supposed to protect the public derives a significant portion of its funding from user fees paid by the companies it regulates. Revolving door employment between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies creates conflicts of interest that have been documented by congressional investigations and academic researchers.

Vaccine safety deserves specific mention because it's an area where legitimate science has been weaponized by both sides. The documented record shows that pharmaceutical companies have, in specific instances, minimized adverse event reports and lobbied against transparency measures. At the same time, the vast majority of vaccine safety claims circulating online are not supported by evidence. The claims we track in this category are strictly evidence-based, distinguishing documented corporate malfeasance from unsubstantiated allegations.

Top Claims in Health & Pharma

UnitedHealth's nH Predict AI wrongly denied 90% of appealed Medicare claims while overriding attending physicians

Purdue Pharma sentenced April 22, 2026: Sacklers pay up to $7B, company forfeits $225M — no family member faces criminal charges for 900,000 opioid deaths

Florida Doctor Criminally Indicted for Removing Patient's Liver Instead of Spleen — Patient Died

The Defense Intelligence Agency was entertaining the COVID lab-leak scenario in March 2020 while public officials called it a conspiracy theory

Nestlé recalled 800+ infant-formula products across 60+ countries after a Wuhan supplier shipped ARA oil contaminated with Bacillus cereus toxin

Frequently Asked Questions

All Health & Pharma Claims

UnitedHealth's nH Predict AI wrongly denied 90% of appealed Medicare claims while overriding attending physicians

Purdue Pharma sentenced April 22, 2026: Sacklers pay up to $7B, company forfeits $225M — no family member faces criminal charges for 900,000 opioid deaths

Florida Doctor Criminally Indicted for Removing Patient's Liver Instead of Spleen — Patient Died

The Defense Intelligence Agency was entertaining the COVID lab-leak scenario in March 2020 while public officials called it a conspiracy theory

Nestlé recalled 800+ infant-formula products across 60+ countries after a Wuhan supplier shipped ARA oil contaminated with Bacillus cereus toxin

Pfizer and subsidiary Greenstone pay $33M in generic drug price-fixing settlement covering bid-rigging and customer allocation

KC Pharmaceuticals recalled 3M+ eye-drop bottles for Pseudomonas contamination — the same plant had an FDA sterility warning in 2023

Private-equity-owned Ohio nursing homes are discharging elderly Medicaid patients directly to homeless shelters when their reimbursement runs out

The Ozempic addiction epidemic nobody is talking about — people can't stop taking it and doctors won't say why

Seed oils were promoted as healthy for decades while research linking them to inflammation was suppressed

A federal court ruled fluoride is a neurotoxin risk and ordered the EPA to act — the 'conspiracy theorists' were right

Fauci briefed Jan 2020 that NIH funded gain-of-function at Wuhan, denied it publicly

ADHD medications are widely overprescribed and misused, especially among youth

Statin muscle pain was dismissed for years until scientists identified the molecular mechanism

Pfizer COVID vaccine trial site had data integrity problems, per whistleblower Brook Jackson

Up to 98 million Americans received polio vaccines contaminated with SV40, a cancer-causing monkey virus

Sackler family directed OxyContin marketing while knowing addiction potential

Merck executives falsified mumps vaccine efficacy data to maintain government contracts

Fauci denied funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, but NIH's own deputy director admitted they did

Claims of mRNA vaccine-induced myocarditis in young males were dismissed as 'misinformation' before being confirmed by the CDC

A federal court ruled fluoride in US drinking water poses 'unreasonable risk' of reducing children's IQ, vindicating decades of dismissed warnings

Aspartame was approved after Searle CEO Donald Rumsfeld used political connections to install a new FDA commissioner who overruled agency scientists

Monsanto ghostwrote safety studies, attacked WHO cancer scientists, and had an EPA insider promise to 'kill' the investigation

DuPont and 3M knew PFAS 'forever chemicals' were toxic since the 1960s, hid birth defect data, and withheld research from the EPA for 20+ years

Major baby food brands knowingly sold products with dangerous levels of lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury to infants

Big Tobacco companies bought food brands and used addiction science to engineer hyper-palatable processed foods — now as addictive as cigarettes

The pharmaceutical industry adopted Big Tobacco's 'doubt is our product' playbook to suppress evidence of drug harms

Natural immunity to COVID was dismissed and censored despite Israeli study showing it was 6-13x more protective than vaccination

Early COVID ventilator protocols had up to 72.8% mortality — doctors abandoned the 'very early intubation' strategy after realizing it was killing patients

An HHS-funded Harvard study found fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported to VAERS — then the CDC refused to cooperate on the fix

Bill Gates held $250M+ in vaccine company stocks while being the largest private funder of WHO and GAVI — shaping global health policy with financial conflicts

COVID lockdowns caused unprecedented collateral damage: child development delays, 30% spike in drug overdoses, and economic devastation — for a 3.2% mortality reduction

The COVID lab leak theory went from 'banned misinformation' to mainstream acceptance — the DOE and FBI now assess it as the most likely origin

GSK hid Paxil suicide risk data in adolescents while marketing for youth depression

Baycol cholesterol drug stayed on market despite known fatal muscle toxicity reports

Tobacco companies knew nicotine was addictive while publicly testifying it was not

DuPont hid cancer risks of Teflon chemical PFOA for decades from workers and public

The Sackler family knew OxyContin was highly addictive and marketed it as safe anyway, fueling the opioid epidemic

3 WIV researchers hospitalized Nov 2019 - before China acknowledged outbreak

Thalidomide was known to cause birth defects but kept on European markets

The sugar industry secretly paid Harvard scientists $50,000 to blame fat for heart disease, shaping 50 years of bad nutrition policy

Fauci pushed to expand toxic AZT treatment to 1.4 million healthy HIV-positive Americans despite the drug's extreme toxicity and limited testing

Bayer knowingly sold HIV-contaminated blood products to hemophiliacs in 1980s

Abbott Labs sold HIV test kits knowing they produced false negatives

Merck knew Vioxx caused heart attacks but hid the data, potentially killing 88,000-140,000 Americans

A whistleblower revealed Pfizer's COVID vaccine trial contractor falsified data, unblinded patients, and was never inspected by the FDA

Fauci's own advisors told him COVID looked engineered, then reversed their position within 3 days and published the opposite conclusion

Thalidomide manufacturer knew of birth defect risks but continued marketing the drug worldwide

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