Exposed: How Pfizer pressured FG over fraudulent drug tests on Nigerian children

A report by Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks has revealed how  American pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals hired investigators to find evidence of corruption against the then Attorney General and Minister of Justice for Nigeria, Michael Aondoakaa to pressure him to drop a $6 billion lawsuit over fraudulent drug tests on Nigerian children.

It would be recalled that the Kano state government had filed civil and criminal suits against Pfizer demanding $2.75 billion dollars in compensation, as well as the prosecution of staff, for what it said was an illegal test of the meningitis drug Trovan on 200 children in the state capital Kano.

Pfizer had in 1996, when Nigeria experienced one of the worst meningitis epidemics in its history with 109,580 cases and 11,717 deaths, volunteered to test  a new antibiotic drug, Trovan on Children in the State.

While Pfizer had tested the drug on adults, it had not yet been tested on children. Additionally, early testing on adults had shown some serious side effects of the drug, including liver problems and cartilage abnormalities.

After learning of the meningitis epidemic, Pfizer decided to use it as an opportunity to test the efficacy of Trovan in pediatric settings.

Pfizer set up a site beside the Doctors Without Borders testing area and over two weeks, selected a sample of 200 children between 3 months and 18 years old to participate.

A month later, 11 of the children that had participated were dead. Additionally, numerous parents of children involved in the trials reported disabilities among their children, including paralysis and liver failure.

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The details of the case were first exposed in 2000 in an investigative series in the Washington Post. In 2007, Nigerian officials brought criminal and civil charges against Pfizer in a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will pay 75 million dollars in compensation over a 1996 drug trial that caused the death of 11 children in Nigeria, an unidentified source familiar with the negotiations said.

According to wikileaks, researchers did not obtain signed consent forms, and medical personnel and Pfizer did not tell parents their children were getting the experimental drug.

With a suit of $2.7bn dollars hanging on its head,  one of the cables revealed that the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer hired investigators to dig up dirt on Nigeria’s former attorney general, Aondoakaa in an effort to pressure him to drop a $6 billion lawsuit against the company.

A State Department cable from 2009 details a meeting between Pfizer’s country manager, Enrico Liggeri, and U.S. officials in Abuja.

The cable reads, “According to Liggeri, Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to Federal Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases.” A few months later, Nigeria settled with Pfizer for just $75 million.

Pfizer however denied the allegations, “Although Pfizer has not seen any documents from the US embassy in Nigeria regarding the federal government cases,” it said, “any notion that the company hired investigators in connection to the former attorney general is simply preposterous.”

Pfizer had argued that meningitis and not its antibiotic had led to the deaths of 11 children and harm to dozens of others. But in 2009 it reached a tentative out-of-court settlement with the Kano state government worth $75m.

The families of four of the children each collected cheques for $175,000 from a compensation trust fund, after submitting DNA samples to show that the dead were their offspring.

Pfizer said also it had settled all outstanding lawsuits involving accusations that it tested the experimental antibiotic Trovan on children.

The pharmaceutical giant also agreed to sponsor health projects in Kano as well as creating a fund of $35m to compensate those affected.