Flashback: Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla dazzled the audience in 2018 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, with fantasies of ingestible computer chips that signal authorities when a drug has been digested.

It is a, basically biological chip that is in the tablet. And once we take the tablet and dissolves into the stomach, sends a signal that you took the tablet. So imagine the applications of that – the compliance. The insurance companies know that the medicines patients should take, they take them.

Reactions to Bourla’s dystopian pitch were about what one would expect – though Pfizer’s defenders chimed in claiming it could be used in “specific” conditions such as ‘schizophrenia and cancers’ to assure compliance.