Posted by Coffee & Covid
🔥 Pfizer is giddily popping Champagne over its HUGE win at the Academy Awards this week. Check out this crazy timeline:
• Between December 2020 and December 2021: VAERS receives over 3,000 reports of vaccine-induced alopecia after first or second dose of Pfizer Covid vaccine.
• February 2021: Arena Pharmaceuticals begins third round clinical trials for its new drug, Etrasimod, which treats alopecia.
• December 2021: Pfizer buys Arena Pharmaceuticals for $7 billion. (Arena’s website is gone now, swallowed up by Pfizer; use the Wayback Machine if you go looking.)
• March 23, 2022: Pfizer issues a press release announcing “Positive Top-Line Results for Phase 3 Trial of Etrasimod” (now called Ritlecitinib).
• March 27, 2022: The Academy Awards begin, sponsored by Pfizer.
… Chris Rock makes a joke about Jada Smith’s alopecia at the Academy Awards.
… Will Smith sissy-slaps Chris Rock on live TV and acts very put out, and says some non-family-friendly stuff, but gets the award anyway. And gets to keep it. And doesn’t have to take anger management.
… For the next few weeks, corporate media becomes fascinated with alopecia, how it hurts women, and why Jada Smith was so understandably upset about the joke. If only there were a safe and effective treatment! And, everybody’s talking about the Oscars. Bonus.
I’m not saying Chris and Will faked the slap. Who knows? But it sure was a great night for sponsor Pfizer, a real marketing coup. My gosh, Pfizer is on a roll — it was so lucky that Chris Rock told THAT exact joke, and THAT exact joke made Will Smith mad enough to act out so totally uncharacteristically and coincidentally promoted Pfizer’s new $7B medication that treats a painfully obvious side-effect of its Covid drug. I mean, what are the odds!
— Jeff Childers