While other industries got reamed by the pandemic, it’s said that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer “won” by moving tens of billions of dollars worth of COVID-19 medicine—enough to still report “all-time-high revenues” just months ago.

Now that vaccine sales have slumped, though, Pfizer is being forced to slash its profit forecast. In early October, shareholders learned that for their fourth-quarter 2023 dividend in December, they will receive just 41 cents per share. That is the same payout Pfizer has given the previous three quarters, and it’s still the most the drugmaker has paid since the year 1995. But it isn’t, alas, dizzying returns anymore.

To make up for these relative “losses,” Pfizer has already quadrupled the price of its top drug (the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, to between $120 and $130 a dose) and more than doubled the price of its second-bestselling drug (lifesaving antiviral treatment Paxlovid, to $1,390 a dose). But this month, the company added that it would also be implementing an “enterprise-wide cost realignment program” to save another at least $3.5 billion in the coming two years. The primary method to achieve these savings, noted Pfizer’s press release, would be through layoffs.

Who’s losing their jobs and how many are being cut still haven’t been announced. But news of the looming layoffs was announced directly to workers on an all-hands call late last week—and, according to Pfizer workers who’ve since lashed out, it was via a “casual” livestream where executives shared scant details with Pfizer’s 83,000-person workforce, then chuckled at some of the questions asked by employees. CEO Albert Bourla—whose salary last year was $33 million, representing a 36% hike—was criticized for “sitting down all relaxed like he was chilling.”

In a poorly thought-out move, perhaps, in retrospect, Pfizer created a comments section at the bottom of the livestream where employees could type messages to coworkers in real time. On Reddit’s r/biotech community group, a user shared screenshots they took of comments that were being sent during the chat. Mass layoffs can never really be conducted in a good way, but there are inarguably varying degrees of bad and worse ways to do them; here, Pfizer seems to have learned nothing from other recent big layoff scandals, such as Better.com CEO Vishal Garg’s infamous Zoom call.

Among the livestream comment screenshots are ones where employees posted observations like, “The casual demeanor is infuriating;” asked questions like, “Will [the leadership team] painfully readjust their salaries too;” and made up fake management quotes like, “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

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