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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12131

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Oboh M.
Nigeria douses hope of settlement with Pfizer
Reuters 2007 Dec 5
http://www.reuters.com/article/health-SP/idUSL0528336920071206?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0


Full text:

KANO, Nigeria, Dec 5 (Reuters) – Nigerian authorities on Wednesday signalled they were unwilling to continue out-of-court settlement talks with drugmaker Pfizer (PFE.N: Quote, Profile, Research) over a 1996 drug trial they say killed 11 children.

The northern state of Kano is suing Pfizer for $2 billion in damages and trying to press criminal charges over the testing of the drug Trovan on children in Kano during a meningitis epidemic. The federal government is suing for an additional $6.5 billion and also trying to press criminal charges.

Nigeria alleges Trovan was responsible for the deaths of 11 children and caused permanent health problems for dozens of others. It also says Pfizer did not obtain proper regulatory approval for the trial and misled parents.

Pfizer denies all the charges. It argues it was meningitis, not Trovan, that killed the children or damaged their health. It says Trovan saved lives and was as effective as the other, established drug used for comparison in the trial.

The federal and state governments had embarked on an out-of-court negotiation process with Pfizer and several meetings took place over the past few weeks. The next one is supposed to take place in London on Dec. 12.

But the Kano attorney general and commissioner for justice, Aliyu Umar, said the state would not be taking part because it was dissatisfied with how the talks were going.

“They are just trying to play with our intelligence. They have not shown any seriousness. The Kano team will not go to London to sit with them again,” Umar told Reuters in his office shortly after the latest court hearing in the civil case.

A federal Ministry of Justice spokesman said President Umaru Yar’Adua had instructed that the case was to be pursued in court and Attorney-General Michael Aondoakaa would comply with that.

“There had been moves to terminate the case but I blocked them,” the ministry spokesman quoted Aondoakaa as saying.

The civil and criminal cases are being heard separately in courts in Kano, Abuja and Lagos. They have developed into a tangle of unresolved petitions and side issues, dragging on from one adjournment to the next since May. No witness has been heard and no substantive issue tackled.

In Wednesday’s hearing in Kano on the state government’s civil suit, the court adjourned the matter until Jan. 28, when it said it would rule on whether it had jurisdiction. Outside the courtroom, a few dozen people who said they were parents of the alleged victims of Trovan protested against the drugmaker. Some held placards with the names of their children.

“Pfizer killed my son, Mustapha Tukur, and I want Pfizer punished,” read one of the placards.

Pfizer had issued a statement on the out-of-court talks from its New York office on Nov. 27 which read: “Pfizer welcomes dialogue conducive to an appropriate resolution of its differences with the federal and Kano state governments and remains committed to any such discussions.

“Unsubstantiated allegations coupled with exorbitant monetary demands, however, will impede that process.”

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909