Everyone from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to President Obama expressed shock and outrage last week when it was “revealed” that American scientists deliberately infected 696 prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago. The scientists were attempting to determine whether penicillin could prevent the transmission of this sexually transmitted disease. Their study ran from 1946 to 1948.
We are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health.
(Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, PBS, October 1, 2010)
But this reaction by U.S. government officials – punctuated by President Obama calling Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom on Friday to apologize – smacks of the reaction by Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca who uttered the famously disingenuous line, “I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”
After all, Wellesley College historian Susan Reverby discovered this unconscionable use of Guatemalans as lab rats merely by combing through the very same files that incited international shock and outrage in 1972 when they revealed that similar experiments were conducted on blacks in Tuskegee, Alabama. In this latter case, medical researchers duped 600 black men already infected with syphilis into thinking that they were being treated so that the researchers could tract the effects of the untreated disease. This study ran from 1932 to 1972.
Even more telling, a U.S. government researcher named Dr. John Cutler was the American Mengele (a la the Nazi doctor who performed similar experiments on Jews in concentrations camps) who conducted both studies. This is why it reeks of incredulity that U.S. government officials needed a college historian to comb through Cutler’s files to discover that he experimented on poor Guatemalans just as he did on poor black Americans.
Meanwhile, given this Guatemalan experiment, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before we find out that U.S. government scientists experimented on poor folks in other countries in this Hemisphere as well; e.g. on Haitians during the U.S. occupation of their country from 1915 to 1934 or on Cubans during the U.S. occupation of their country from 1917 to 1933.
Not to mention that this official shock and outrage is betrayed by the fact that researchers at American pharmaceutical companies are still conducting human experiments – no doubt with the tacit approval of the U.S. government. Specifically, these companies have been using Africans as guinea pigs to ensure the efficacy and safety of new drugs for their American consumers for decades.
I have written a series of commentaries decrying this practice and, more importantly, calling African governments to fight back by hitting “big pharma” where it hurts; i.e., on their bottom line.
Accordingly, it is noteworthy the Guatemalan government has signaled its intent to file claims for reparations – notwithstanding what I’m sure was a heartfelt apology from President Obama. I just hope the Guatemalans can put a bigger hurt on the U.S. government than African governments have been able to put on the pharmaceutical companies.
In any event, for your edification, I shall reprise my most recent commentary from February 4, 2009. This commentary reprises another from July 23, 2007 and ends with an update from July 30, 2009 that should prove instructive in this case. Taken together they not only delineate this unseemly practice but also show why, for big pharma, the financial benefits of continuing it outweigh any shock and outrage it incites.
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Pfizer’s Constant Gardening in Africa
Last year a lower-court judge ruled that Nigerian families who claim that Pfizer used their children as guinea pigs to test new drugs had to file their suits in Nigeria. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York ruled on Friday that they can sue the pharmaceutical giant in U.S. courts after all.
This is a home run for us. The judges are making a statement. They are telling companies, ‘If you go overseas, justice will come back to the United States.’
(Richard P. Altschuler, an attorney for the families)
Indeed, I am truly hopeful that this will lead not only to Pfizer having to pay billions in compensation to these families, but also to its executives being incarcerated in Nigeria, where, after international pressure, Nigerian authorities are now prosecuting them on criminal charges as well.
For now though, I shall suffice to reprise my July 23, 2007 commentary on this case.
Comeuppance for Pfizer
(and other pharmaceutical companies)
in Africa…?
[I]t was brilliantly acted and dramatized the all-too-real exploits of corrupt governments and multi-national (pharmaceutical) corporations that routinely entail sacrificing human lives for profit – especially African lives that are regarded so cheaply, universally.
Therefore, I was truly heartened when the BBC reported last week that the Nigerian government has filed a lawsuit against pharmaceutical hegemon Pfizer. In this landmark class-action case, Nigeria alleges that Pfizer scientists conducted illegal trials of an anti-meningitis drug (Trovan) that they knew or should have known would kill or deform hundreds of Nigerian children – as it surely did.
Even worse, the suit alleges that these scientists duped Nigerian parents into offering up their children as guinea pigs. This horrific allegation stems from the fact that, after a severe outbreak of meningitis in 1996, radio broadcasts urged concerned parents to take their children “as quickly as possible,” to local clinics, where international aid workers from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) were administering free emergency treatment.
Critically, however, the parents were not told that agents from Pfizer had also set up shop at those clinics and were slipping their children an “unregistered and unapproved trial drug as part of this treatment.”
The American doctors took advantage of our illiteracy and cheated us and our children. We thought they were helping us.
We did not suspect that our children were being used for an experiment. They have cheated us and our children. All I can say is that God will judge them according to their evil deeds.
(Hassan Sani – whose daughter Hajara (pictured here) was one of the “lucky” victims)
It is regrettable, however, that this is only a civil action to collect money for pain and suffering; especially since it would take only chump change for Viagra-producing Pfizer to pay-off the $7bn in damages being sought.
After all, if the Nigerian government really wanted to vindicate and honor the lives of these innocent victims, it would follow the lead of its Kano regional government by pursuing criminal prosecutions to imprison Pfizer’s Mengeles for serial manslaughter and murder….
Meanwhile, I appreciate that the film probably dramatizes this dark secret of American enterprise in too entertaining a fashion to incite the level of outrage that would compel a multi-national corporation like Pfizer to stop its exploitation of the poor Africans for profit. And I fear that even this court trial will do little more in this respect.
Therefore, I highly recommend you buy the book by John LeCarre on which the film is based. Because reading it is far more likely to evoke the kind of moral indignation against this constant gardening in Africa that is warranted.
Perhaps you recall that back in 1972 the New York Times exposed the U.S. government for conducting “the longest non-therapeutic experiment on human beings [namely, poor black sharecroppers in Alabama] in medical history.” In fact, the experiment ran from 1932 until this exposé incited such universal condemnation that the government was compelled to end its “Tuskegee Syphilis Study” post haste and pay $10 million to compensate the victims and their heirs – to forestall a class action lawsuit.
Yet those who condemned the government for this syphilis experiment appear to have no conscientious objection to the fact that U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are experimenting with new drugs on Africans to ensure their safety for Americans. And this unconscionable practice is hardly redeemed by Pfizer’s self-righteous claim that its experiments are for the good of all mankind, not merely for the benefit of its shareholders; nor by its even more specious claim that it secured consent decrees from all of these guinea pigs beforehand….
So, where’s the outrage!!!
NOTE: The next time you hear that primitive customs make Africans suspicious of lifesaving vaccinations that westerners take for granted (like those for polio), think of the barbaric practices of pharmaceutical companies that have given them just cause to be suspicious….
UPDATE
Pfizer Settles
As indicated in my original article, even a billion-dollar settlement would do little to dent Pfizer’s bottom line. Therefore, imagine how pleased it must have been to sign off today on a measly seventy-five-million-dollar agreement with the Kano regional government, which was seeking $2.75 billion to settle criminal and civil charges.
According to today’s edition of the Washington Post, thirty million dollars will go toward health-care initiatives, ten million dollars toward legal costs, and thirty-five million dollars toward a fund for valid claims. Several other Trovan-related cases are still pending, most notably the Nigerian federal government’s seven-billion-dollar case.
NOTE: Trovan was never approved for use by children in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration approved it for adults in 1998, but later severely restricted its use after reports of liver failure. The European Union banned it in 1999.
July 30, 2009
Related Articles:
Pfizer’s constant gardening…
2006 Academy Awards
Pfizer’s Mengeles
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