Pfizer to Pay £50 Million After Deaths of Nigerian Children in Drug Trial Experiment
April 7th, 2009Via: Independent:
A divorce case was all that passed for excitement at Richard P Altschuler’s “kinda small” lawyer’s office in West Haven, Connecticut, when the phone rang nine years ago. On the other end of the line, a world away in the heat of Nigeria, was Etigwe Uwo, a young lawyer with “an incredible story about Pfizer”. The Lagos attorney was going to take on the largest pharmaceutical company in the world in an unprecedented class action pitting African parents against an American corporate giant. And he needed help.
Mr Etigwe had chosen Mr Altschuler because, back in 1979, the Connecticut lawyer had successfully defended a friend of the Nigerian. The unlikely pair were about to embark on a marathon journey into the world of “big pharma”. Nine years on and their efforts have finally been rewarded with a reported $75m (£50m) settlement, the terms of which are likely to be released this week.
If it sounds like the script of a Hollywood blockbuster that’s because it was this story that prompted John Le Carre to write The Constant Gardener, according to Mr Altschuler.
In real life it was to Nigeria, not Kenya, that Pfizer turned. In 1996, the company needed a human trial for what it hoped would be a pharmaceutical “blockbuster”, a broad spectrum antibiotic that could be taken in tablet form. The US-based company sent a team of its doctors into the Nigerian slum city of Kano in the midst of an appaling meningitis epidemic to perform what it calls a “humanitarian mission”. However the accusers claim it was an unlicensed medical trial on critically-ill children.
$75 million in increasingly worthless USD for experimenting on helpless children, and selecting them based in part on the likelihood that they would be unable to fight back, and from a multi-billion dollar company? I’m sure Lilly barely blinked when paying it. I remember one year when a subsidiary of Abbott labs casually peeled of $9 billion USD for the federal government for systematic medicare fraud in conjunction with doctors.