BRUSSELS — Despite the uproar caused by revelations at a European Union hearing that the pharmaceutical giant rushed the COVID-19 vaccine out into use without testing it for preventing transmission, Pfizer executives were quick to backtrack and point out that they did, in fact, test the vaccine — on over five billion people.

"While there were no widespread, controlled tests of the vaccine in the clinical sense, to say we didn't have any guinea pigs to try our vaccine on wouldn't be the truth," said Janine Small, Pfizer's president of international developed markets said at the hearing. "We didn't really know what would happen when we shot human beings up with this stuff, so we decided to test it in the most widespread way possible — by injecting it into over five billion people."

While t

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