Becky McClain is a molecular biologist who worked at Pfizer for ten years. McClain raised urgent alarms about biosafety lapses at her biotech lab at Pfizer. McClain’s warnings about dangerous, genetically engineered viruses that were handled without following standard safety protocols were met with hostility, intimidation, and ultimately, devastating illness after a workplace exposure changed her life forever.
Now she has documented her fight for justice in a new book – Exposed: A Pfizer Scientist Battles Corruption, Lies, and Betrayal, and Becomes a Biohazard Whistleblower (Skyhorse, September 2025).
Trying to summarize the nightmare that McClain faced at the hands of Pfizer and its servants in the federal government, the courts, academia and the press is just not possible.
“No general description of this book can convey the horror and details of what Becky McClain and her husband, Mark, endured at the hands of Pfizer, enabled over the years by collusion with government officials,” Ralph Nader writes in the forward to Exposed. “Pre-verdict and post-verdict, this company employed thuggish retaliatory tactics, blacklisting, threats, harassments, wrongful discharges, coverups, and demands for total gag orders. Those tactics were designed to keep her case from flaring into a national demand for Congressional regulation in the form of rigorous biolab inspections.”
“I was a molecular biologist at Pfizer working at an embryonic stem cell laboratory,” McClain told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “By the time I started working on embryonic stem cells, I had seventeen years experience. I understood the issues related to public health and safety in the workplace.”
How were you exposed and what impact did it have on your health?
“I was exposed to a few things, the most important of which was a lentivirus that was used on my private workbench without any biocontainment. I discovered that a month after the exposure and after I became ill. Someone approached me and said they were using a lentivirus on my personal lab bench. Unfortunately, I became very ill. It took a while. It was a slow progressive illness to the point that I was falling down paralyzed. I was diagnosed with transient periodic paralysis.”
When were you exposed and how long did the illness last?
“I was exposed in October 2003. Unfortunately, I still have remnants of the illness. I was exposed to a lentivirus that has the potential to integrate into your genome. They use these technologies for long term expression in research labs. So if you expose a human to these lentiviruses, you will get long term effects.”
“My health is much improved after twenty years. And that makes sense because these technologies usually peter out after twenty years but I still have to be very careful. I am on prescription drugs to prevent paralysis attacks. And it’s just not paralysis. It’s a systemic illness where I get spinal pain, headaches, severe fatigue. But it’s much more manageable now and my life is better now that I have had this illness for a while.”
A good part of your book is your attempt to get justice from Pfizer You eventually did sue the company. And there was a jury trial and the jury ruled in your favor. Did you get justice for what happened to you?
“Compared to other whistleblowers and injured workers, by all means, I did get justice because I was able to get my case before a jury. Most injured workers or whistleblowers go through agencies that are heavily influenced by corporations. I was happy that as a biotech whistleblower I was able to get to a jury. Unfortunately, I was not able to place in front of a jury my exposure and the resulting injury. They wouldn’t allow that in – the judge ruled that was solely a worker’s compensation issue.”
“I did get justice on the two free speech whistleblower counts. I was happy with that because otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to publish this book.”
Why not?
“I won a lawsuit and that gives my case a lot of credibility. Many injured workers get their cases thrown out.”
What did the jury award in damages?
“They awarded me $1.3 million for the ten years that Pfizer retaliated against me. That was about my salary over ten years. And that was it. I did not get any recompense for them ruining my career, I was not compensated for the injuries. The judge threw out the injury claim.”
“We did go to workers comp to try and get a remedy, but they ruled that trade secrets superseded my rights to get exposure records for my healthcare. If I couldn’t get the exposure records, there was no remedy for me under workers comp.”
“Workers compensation is the only place a worker can go to get a remedy for injury on the job. But it’s very difficult to secure a remedy. If you fall down at work and break your arm, that’s an easier case. But when you are exposed to an invisible genetically engineered agent, it becomes harder to prove. You are exposed, you become ill. How do you prove that the exposure caused your illness?”
“The first thing is to secure your exposure records. And if the powers that be don’t want to give injured workers the exposure records to get proof that there is a correlation, there is not much you can do. Legally, it’s too high a standard to prove your exposure caused your illness.”
“In my case, I was able to get some exposure records – not enough to get tested, but enough to describe to some degree the characteristics of the exposure that I incurred.”
“The exposure was to a lentivirus that had an element called shRNA that is basically a genetic missile that is cloned into a virus to silence or destroy certain genetic products in a cell.”
“When I received that information, I found out that those genetic missiles were predicted to cause periodic paralysis. And I had already been hospitalized with transient periodic paralysis, which is a very rare condition. I had a causal link. But again, the powers that be would not let us before a jury.”
How widespread is the problem of workers being exposed at genetic engineering labs?
“Last year, Alison Young and others wrote a book called – Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk (Center Street, 2023). There have been other publications about it. I wouldn’t say that every biotech lab has these types of problems. I assume there are some private labs operated with integrity.”
“Big corporations like Pfizer have the legal muscle to silence whistleblowers. Although there are other cases that I know of smaller biotech companies that treat injured workers in the same way I was treated. I’m positive this is not an isolated issue.”
Are you retired now?
“Yes. I was very ill after the exposure. I could be sick for three weeks to a couple of days. Then I would get back to normal, but then it would come back and punch me again. It’s very difficult to hold down a job in that situation. It was very difficult.”
Have you soured on the biotech industry generally?
“No. Advancement in society is very important for society. But I am very concerned about the public health ramifications of scientists not having free speech to even bring up injuries and biosafety issues for workplace safety and for public health safety. That’s very alarming, especially in our post-Covid environment.”
“The problem is that the biotechnology industry has so much power that they can silence anyone who brings up these issues. They have the power to silence these issues from being voiced in the public domain. So, yes I’m very worried about that. Biotechnology itself is a wonderful science that will make society better. But we need free speech for scientists and better oversight in these labs.”
What’s your take on OSHA’s role in handling whistleblower complaints?
“OSHA was very disappointing. I had no idea of the OSHA conflicts of interest, that the agency had become captured by industry. I have a masters degree from a school of public health. And I studied OSHA law during school.”
“When I went to OSHA, I assumed I would get a fair hearing into my complaints. But the agency didn’t even do a safety inspection after I gave them credible evidence that there were major biosafety issues at Pfizer and that they were silencing multiple scientists.”
“OSHA threw out my cases. During one interview, they stole all of my attorney client privileged documents. They were definitely working for corporations. That was my impression.”
You went to OSHA because that is the agency responsible for protecting whistleblower rights. And you went there before you filed your lawsuit?
“Yes, OSHA threw out my case and then I filed my lawsuit in Connecticut. The reason I filed the lawsuit was because I couldn’t get my exposure records and I was very ill.”
Did you ever get the sequence of the lentivirus that injured you?
“Once I found an attorney they did give me a partial sequence. But it was not a complete sequence. It was not the complete genetic sequence of the virus. It looked like it had been manipulated. But the important part of giving me that was that I could decipher some of the characteristics of the virus I was exposed to and what it would be predicted to do if a human was exposed to it. And the prediction was exactly what happened to me.”
“That gave me a causal link to my illness. But Pfizer refused to give me the complete sequence. And when they found out there was a causal link to my illness, they came back with another sequence that had no causal link, without the shRNA. And they said the first sequence was a mistake.”
If you were to set up a safety regime for the biotech industry, what would it look like?
“There is a lack of oversight now. When this happened to me, you had Harvard scientists telling reporters – the biotech industry is over regulated. That’s one major problem.”
You mean the anti-regulation rhetoric?
“Yes. But one of the major issues is that workers are being silenced. We need to increase whistleblower protections. We have to make it a bit easier for scientists to speak out regarding health and safety issues. The first thing I would do would be to make all gag orders regarding health and safety issues completely illegal.”
Did you have a gag order?
“I didn’t have a gag order. That’s why they came after me so hard. They put so much pressure on me to make me sign a gag order. Early on, I was doing more activism. And whistleblowers would call me. And they were petrified because they had signed a gag order and they couldn’t tell me much.”
“It was interesting to me that these workers who were calling me had already signed a gag order. Maybe when they are hiring they are making people sign gag orders, I don’t know.”
“I never signed a gag order in the beginning of my employment at Pfizer. But once I started taking legal action every settlement discussion the most important thing they wanted was for me to sign a gag order. They didn’t want this information to get out. I know, by talking with many injured workers, they somehow have all signed gag orders. They can’t talk to me about these issues, because they are frightened they are going to be destroyed.”
“So gag orders should be totally illegal when it comes to issues of health and safety.”
“Another problem is that workers have no free speech rights when they are injured at work. I was able to get through the court system because mine was a public health and safety issue. I would say that workers have complete rights to free speech if it’s a health and safety issue. It wouldn’t have to also be a public health and safety issue.”
These scared workers who were calling you, were you able to help any of them get some justice for their cases?
“The lady who called me a year after I won the lawsuit was so terrified. She was a single mother. She was crying over the phone. She said she couldn’t fight it. She had already signed a gag order. And she really couldn’t give me much information. She said she heard my story and said – I can’t go through that. And after reading my book, who would go through that?”
“I was forced to go through it. I had a severe illness. I thought I was going to die. My husband and I thought at one point that I was going to die. I had no other choice. I had to go forward. I never considered myself a whistleblower. I never said – I’m going to report these types of problems. The problem was I was so sick and I needed my exposure records. That’s what pushed me forward.”
Pfizer appealed the jury’s verdict to the appeals court.
“Yes, and the appeals court upheld the judgment. It took three years from winning the lawsuit to getting the check from Pfizer. My exposure was in 2003. I won the lawsuit in 2010. In 2013 I got the money. As soon as they lost the appeals decision, the retaliation stopped.”
What did the retaliation consist of after you won the verdict?
“They went after my husband. After I won the verdict, we went into post-trial settlement discussions. They wanted a gag order.”
How did they go after your husband?
“There is something called backdoor retaliation. If a worker does not cooperate with the corporation regarding gag orders, they will go after your spouse. They want to put so much financial pressure on you that you have to sign your rights away.”
“My husband worked at the FDA and they were trying to get him fired. He’s now retired. He survived the retaliation. But they started it two months prior to the start of my court case. And they told him that if doesn’t make me settle with Pfizer prior to the lawsuit, then he’s out of a job. Of course, my husband went through hell. We were only married one year before this happened. He was just as worried about me as I was. After I won the lawsuit they went after him badly. He almost lost his job. And he was a commissioned officer. He almost lost his commission – which was his retirement. We finally escaped it. But we had to hire an attorney for him as we waited for the appeal decision. Once we got the appeals decision, the retaliation stopped.”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Becky McClain, 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 37(13), September 29, 2025, print edition only.]