Pfizer Sues Chinese Employee for Transferring Vaccine Secrets to Cloud

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Cho Hyun-ui] U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer has sued an employee who was offered a job at a competitor, accusing him of stealing numerous company secrets, including data related to the COVID-19 vaccine.

According to Bloomberg and other sources on the 25th, Pfizer filed a lawsuit against employee Li Chunxiao on the 23rd (local time) at the U.S. District Court in San Diego, California.

Li had worked in Pfizer’s global product development group in China since 2006 before transferring to San Diego in 2016, where he recently served as deputy head of statistics. His nationality, reportedly of Chinese descent, has not been confirmed.

Pfizer claims that Li violated a confidentiality agreement by transferring over 12,000 files from his computer to cloud-based platforms such as Google Drive without company approval. The files in question reportedly included internal evaluations and recommendations regarding Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, information about the relationship with BioNTech, the vaccine’s co-developer, explanations related to cancer antibodies, and new drug data.

In the complaint, Pfizer stated, "Li continuously tried to conceal his actions by deleting files," and "after the file transfer became an issue, he submitted a different laptop instead of the company-issued one."

They added, "It appears he is planning to move to the competitor Genko." Pfizer revealed that they learned of Li receiving a job offer from Genko through his company email.

The court has decided to prevent Li from using Pfizer’s trade secrets and allowed Pfizer’s lawyers to inspect the Google Drive account and computer where Li may have stored the data.

For security reasons, Pfizer has prohibited transferring files via portable storage devices (USB) since 2019. In October of this year, they also implemented technology to monitor employees uploading files to platforms like Google Drive.