Injured Pfizer Researcher Comes Forward, Pfizer Won’t Release Health Records
July 9, 2009 at 1:38 pm EST | Tags: Healthcare & Medicine, Scandals, Video
Check out this video about Becky McClain. Becky was a safety officer at Pfizer’s CT facility where she was exposed to what she calls biological hazards, specifically viruses and EBSCs (embryonic stem cells). She claims to be seriously ill as a result of the contaminants, although doesn’t quite explain what her disease is. She says she was hospitalized and seriously ill.
Still, she talks about how Pfizer was lax about protecting researchers, told her to stop documenting safety hazards after she complained how people ate lunch in the lab (a big NO NO!!!). She was eventually given the axe for complaining too much! She has been fighting since that time to obtain the right to her exposure records which are necessary for healthcare and compensation for her injuries. Pfizer still refuses to release these records.
The video is a bit long, but check it out…
Thoughts?
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PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY – That’s what this case is all about. If your employer refuses to provide PPE (personal protective equipment) then you have a case, but in most cases the PPE is on offer but the workers are just too lazy to bother wearing it (because gloves/masks etc. are uncomfortable).
Her story never actually gets into the details of what the “illness” was that she became infected with. She just describes it as “progressive”. Nevertheless, apparently the workers “knew” that the source of the illness was the biosafety cabinet exhaust. She never actually says how they found this out – what did they do… have people breathe the exhaust and see if they got ill? As a safety officer, probably it was her job to make sure the cabinet was serviced regularly and the filters replaced…. hmmm… wonder if she did that properly?
She claims to have been infected by a human infective virus that was being worked on “on her own personal bench space” WTF? I’m not aware that it’s even possible to do good virus work out on a bench – it must be done in a biosafety cabinet. The reason for this is not just to contain the virus – it’s the stop the bio-material you’re working on from getting contaminated, otherwise your experiment will not work!
She’s scaremongering… she asks “why do researchers need to make viruses?… we need them to make things sick” WTF? She understands nothing about transfections, genetic manipulations of organisms for assays and for non-disease models. She’s claiming the entire biotech industry exists to make mice ill, so we can study diseases.
She claims you can take HIV and recombine it with rabies, and end up with a version of HIV that can be infective via inhalational route… This is complete garbage! Total misunderstanding of viral recombination and replication. She then goes on to say that there are “BSL2 labs doing this stuff in your neighborhood”. Again a lie – getting a BSL2 certification is not easy.
She also claims (citing OSHA) that there are “Basically there are no rules regulating this industry, only recomendations and guidelines” – again a complete lie!
Unfortunately, there are enough people out there who don’t know any better, and will soak this stuff up and go screaming to OSHA for tighter regulations on all molecular biology. Thanks stupid lady, you just killed the industry that gave yo a job for 25 years, all because you got an illness that cannot be traced to your job.