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Pfizer was founded in 1849 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by German immigrant cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart, whose first hit was santonin, a bitter treatment for intestinal worms flavored with almond toffee and shaped into a candy cone. By the 1880s its main business was citric acid for soft drinks, made from Italian calcium citrate. When World War I blockades cut that supply, its chemists turned to a mold that fermented sugar into citric acid, and by 1919 Pfizer had pioneered deep tank fermentation in 10,000-gallon vats. That know-how let it mass produce penicillin in World War II, and it made most of the penicillin that went ashore at Normandy. When prices collapsed after the war, a global soil sampling program yielded oxytetracycline in 1950 and turned Pfizer into a drug discovery company.

Sildenafil, created in 1989 to treat angina, failed for the heart but produced a side effect in trial volunteers; it was approved in 1998 as Viagra. Zoloft launched in 1991, and Lipitor, co-marketed from 1997, made about $125 billion over 14 and a half years. Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert for $116 billion in 2000, Pharmacia in 2003 and Wyeth for $68 billion in 2009, but a 2016 $160 billion merger with Allergan, designed to move its tax home to Ireland, was dropped after the Obama administration changed inversion rules. In 2009 it paid a $2.3 billion settlement over illegal promotion of the painkiller Bextra. For COVID-19 it declined initial U.S. research funding, spent about $2 billion of its own with BioNTech, and announced a 95 percent effective mRNA vaccine in November 2020.

• Defective Shiley mechanical heart valves fractured in patients, about 500 died, and Pfizer paid $10.75 million in 1994 over allegations it misled regulators.
• In a 1996 meningitis outbreak in Kano, Nigeria, a trial of the antibiotic Trovan on children was followed by deaths and disabilities and allegations of missing consent.
• Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables said Pfizer investigators sought corruption evidence against Nigeria’s attorney general to pressure him over the lawsuits.
• Pfizer bought cancer drug maker Seagen for $43 billion in December 2023.
• In October 2025 Pfizer pledged $70 billion in U.S. investment to the Trump administration in exchange for a three-year exemption from pharmaceutical tariffs.