Pfizer: Worm Candy, Penicillin Vats, Viagra and the Trovan Trial

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Pfizer was founded in 1849 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by German immigrant cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart, whose first hit was santonin, a bitter treatment for intestinal worms flavored with almond toffee and shaped into a candy cone. By the 1880s its main business was citric acid for soft drinks, made from Italian calcium citrate. When World War I blockades cut that supply, its chemists turned to a mold that fermented sugar into citric acid, and by 1919 Pfizer had pioneered deep tank fermentation in 10,000-gallon vats. That know-how let it mass produce penicillin in World War II, and it made most of the penicillin that went ashore at Normandy. When prices collapsed after the war, a global soil sampling program yielded oxytetracycline in 1950 and turned Pfizer into a drug discovery company.

Sildenafil, created in 1989 to treat angina, failed for the heart but produced a side effect in trial volunteers; it was approved in 1998 as Viagra. Zoloft launched in 1991, and Lipitor, co-marketed from 1997, made about $125 billion over 14 and a half years. Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert for $116 billion in 2000, Pharmacia in 2003 and Wyeth for $68 billion in 2009, but a 2016 $160 billion merger with Allergan, designed to move its tax home to Ireland, was dropped after the Obama administration changed inversion rules. In 2009 it paid a $2.3 billion settlement over illegal promotion of the painkiller Bextra. For COVID-19 it declined initial U.S. research funding, spent about $2 billion of its own with BioNTech, and announced a 95 percent effective mRNA vaccine in November 2020.

• Defective Shiley mechanical heart valves fractured in patients, about 500 died, and Pfizer paid $10.75 million in 1994 over allegations it misled regulators.
• In a 1996 meningitis outbreak in Kano, Nigeria, a trial of the antibiotic Trovan on children was followed by deaths and disabilities and allegations of missing consent.
• Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables said Pfizer investigators sought corruption evidence against Nigeria's attorney general to pressure him over the lawsuits.
• Pfizer bought cancer drug maker Seagen for $43 billion in December 2023.
• In October 2025 Pfizer pledged $70 billion in U.S. investment to the Trump administration in exchange for a three-year exemption from pharmaceutical tariffs.