Shareholder Campaign > Pfizer

Pfizer is the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company, manufacturing a diverse array of human and veterinary pharmaceuticals and consumer health-care products. Government regulations require some animal testing for medical products, but companies are afforded flexibility in choosing the tests that they use to establish the safety and effectiveness of new products.

2005 Resolutions: Give the Animals 5 & Donations to Support Animal Research

PETA’s “Give the Animals 5” Campaign calls on companies to abandon five crude and cruel animal tests, replacing them with state-of-the-art and scientifically valid non-animal methods that are already in use in other countries. As a corporate shareholder in Pfizer, PETA filed a resolution in the fall of 2003, calling on the company to do the following:

Issue a policy statement publicly committing to the use of in vitro tests for assessing skin corrosion, skin absorption, skin irritation, phototoxicity, and pyrogenicity endpoints and generally committing to the elimination of product testing on animals in favor of validated in vitro alternatives
Formally request that the relevant regulatory agencies accept validated in vitro tests as replacements for animal tests

Despite its progressively worded “Animal Care and Use Policy,” which included the company's stated commitment to the reduction and replacement of animal tests, Pfizer took a position in opposition to PETA’s shareholder resolution. Nonetheless, 104.4 million shares (2.2 percent) were voted in favor of the resolution at Pfizer’s annual meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 22, 2004.

Later that same year, the Financial Times of London reported on July 29, 2004, that Pfizer and two other pharmaceutical companies (AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline) donated 4 million pounds (£4,000,000) to British universities to promote medical research and training specifically using animals. In response, PETA and six of its members who hold Pfizer stock filed a resolution calling on the company to do the following:

Make no further donations or contributions designed to promote the advancement of animal testing and rescind the donation made to U.K. universities to the extent legally permissible
Donate equivalent funds to promote non-animal-based test methodologies if the donations cannot be rescinded

Pfizer opposed our resolution and sought permission from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the agency responsible for administering federal securities laws in the U.S.—to exclude our resolution from its proxy statement, arguing that it dealt with ordinary business matters that are not subject to a vote by stockholders. Regrettably, the SEC staff concurred with Pfizer’s arguments, and PETA’s resolution was never brought to a shareholder vote.

The other two pharmaceutical companies are AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline.

2006 Resolutions: Animal Welfare Policy and Donations to Support Animal Research

In 2006, PETA submitted another two resolutions to Pfizer. The first resolution called on the company to extend its animal welfare policy to include social and behavioral enrichment measures for the animals used and to ensure that any outside contract testing laboratories used comply with the policy.

The resolution was largely the result of the horrors uncovered in the independent contract testing laboratory Covance Inc., whose officials boast that they have every major company as a client.

Pfizer again challenged our resolution at the SEC, partly on the grounds that since animals cannot communicate their own needs, the company was not responsible for addressing them. The SEC ruled in PETA’s favor and ordered Pfizer to publish the PETA-sponsored resolution in its shareholder proxy materials.

The second resolution addressed the issue of Pfizer’s donations to support animal research (see above). Our resolution was amended this year to simply ask the company to report to the shareholders its justification for promoting animal testing despite publishing an animal welfare policy that professes a commitment to non-animal methods of testing.

Pfizer published both our resolutions in its proxy materials along with its opposition statements advising shareholders to vote against them. On April 27, 2006, a PETA representative traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska, to present our resolutions at Pfizer’s annual meeting. Our resolution on amending the company’s animal welfare policy garnered 6.4 percent of the vote, while our resolution on justification for the promotion of animal testing won 5.3 percent of the vote (more than 279 million and 232 million shares respectively). Both resolutions qualified to be reintroduced in 2007.

PPG Industries >