Asian Tech Press (Nov 29) -- A Chinese woman was sued by U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc. the day before Thanksgiving for allegedly stealing a large number of confidential documents, including the company's COVID-19 vaccine secrets, before she left her job.

As Reuters reported, Chun Xiao Li, a longtime Pfizer employee, violated a confidentiality agreement by uploading more than 12,000 documents to her personal cloud-based hard drive accounts and devices without permission, including some documents related to its COVID-19 vaccine.

The documents involved information on various Pfizer vaccines, drugs and other inventions, including Pfizer's internal evaluation and recommendations for its COVID-19 vaccine and the contents of Pfizer's collaboration with German biopharmaceutical company BioNTech SE.

Li began working for Global Product Development (GPD) at Pfizer in China in 2006, before moving to in the San Diego area of its U.S. headquarters in 2016, the suit says.

The records also show that she downloaded sensitive information and uploaded it to her personal storage devices between Oct. 23-26, primarily during weekend hours.

Pfizer said Li used her position as associate director of statistics to get access to a large number of confidential business documents. She then left Pfizer for a competitor called Xencor Inc., a California-based clinical-stage company that develops drugs for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

The company confirmed that Li, who resigned after 15 years with Pfizer, was scheduled to start work at her new company on Nov. 29.

In an order Tuesday evening, a U.S. District Judge has temporarily blocked Li from using Pfizer's trade secrets and said the company's attorneys, could inspect the accounts and devices where she stored the documents.

A further hearing will be held Dec. 9.