Human Rights
We strive to respect human rights in all of our business activities. We fully support the principles contained in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Labour Organization Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Pfizer is a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact and we support its Ten Principles on human rights, labor, environment and anti-corruption.
As a global company, we operate in complex economic, social and political environments. These growing complexities bring with them an enlarged role for us in ensuring human rights within our operations and working for human betterment through our increasingly broad global presence.
Pfizer's efforts to respect human rights focus on four key areas:
- Access to Health
- Employees
- Clinical Trials
- Supply Chain
We believe that people should have access to the health care they need. While governments have the primary responsibility to provide this, we embrace the unique role Pfizer can play in promoting better health around the world. Our commitment is embodied in the many approaches we have developed to improve access to medicines and strengthen health care systems for underserved people.
We engage regularly in productive dialogue with key stakeholders in order to continually refine our access strategies and ensure their successful implementation within the broader system of health initiatives led by government and other players. Our access strategies leverage Pfizer's core capabilities in R&D and health care systems in order to improve affordable, accessible and quality care for underserved populations in developing and developed countries. These strategies include building local capacity, implementing appropriate pricing models, expanding our product offerings, and developing relevant partnerships that bring unique capabilities to the challenge of expanding access.
We are committed to upholding and respecting the fundamental human rights of our employees as enshrined in the International Labour Organization Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.
We have ongoing training initiatives to ensure that human rights of employees are respected at every level within the organization, and throughout the many countries in which our colleagues operate. Our trainings demonstrate a commitment to workforce diversity and equal opportunity. This includes annual training and certification for employees on the Pfizer Code of Business Conduct, covering issues such as equal opportunity and nondiscrimination, as well as actions to take in the event of discrimination and/or harassment in the workplace. Managers are responsible for communicating and enforcing our equal opportunity policy. Each operating unit monitors and reports on its performance in the area of equal opportunity.
We conduct clinical trials globally with strict adherence to the highest ethical and scientific standards.
Pfizer has run trials in over 60 countries. We only place trials in markets where the investigational medicine will be made available, if it is shown to be safe and effective, and only where there is a qualified pool of physician-investigators, sufficient medical infrastructure to support quality research, and a sufficient number of patients who are likely to be interested in participating. Increasingly, this includes countries in the developing world. Our policies and process require that informed consent, independent ethics review, post-study care, and the use of placebos conform to established international ethical standards. In an effort to continually strengthen clinical research infrastructure, we have developed a certification program for our clinical research staff and contractors, with over 1,000 colleagues and contractors now having successfully completed this certification program.
Our commitment to human rights extends beyond our workforce to include the significant risks that can exist across our global and complex supply chain.
We are a founding member of the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative (PSCI), which promotes supplier adherence to five PSCI principles: ethics, labor, health and safety, environment and management systems. As a steering committee member for this group, Pfizer has played a key role in driving implementation of the group's principles both throughout our own company's supply chain and throughout the supply chains of the pharmaceutical industry as a whole.
