Pfizer Abandons Heartland Institute

From one of the very few media outlets that has bothered to pick up the story, an early Xmas gift:

A major pharmaceutical company has opted to sever ties with a libertarian think tank that provides arguments critical of global warming and the effects of tobacco smoking.

Pfizer Inc., a New York City-based business that boasts of being the world's largest research-based pharmaceutical company, decided to cut financial support from the Heartland Institute.

Pfizer's decision came about after lot of hard-work that started this Spring after the leak of HI's financial statements and their short-lived and yet now infamous billboard campaign.  As Brad Johnson of Forecast the Facts put it:

This was the result of a sustained campaign by a lot of people. We at Forecast the Facts applied pressure on lots of fronts -- getting customers to complain on Facebook and phone calls, flyering Pfizer employees at their NY headquarters, flyering participants of medical conferences sponsored by Pfizer, writing blog posts and putting out media statements and working with other bloggers and writers at the New York Times and specialty health publications, coordinating with the American Thoracic Society, American Cancer Society, and numerous other health groups (many of which take funding from Pfizer). We also worked with Greenpeace, Union of Concerned Scientists, shareholder groups, SumOfUs, and other great organizations who also applied invaluable pressure on Pfizer's board.

And, just to blow my own horn a little, one of  2012's few concrete accomplishments here at BCLSB was my campaign to convince of number of "experts" associated with HI to cut their ties to the organization after the aforementioned billboard campaign.  Nice to see their gradual ostracization within the lobbying community and, more importantly, their gradual de-funding has continued apace.  Its probably safe to say that HI has lost $100,000s in industry support since May.

PS.  More here.