Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11895

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Publication type: news

Pfizer urges Nigerian court to reject official report on drug trial
Thomson Financial 2007 Oct 24
http://www.abcmoney.co.uk/news/252007150933.htm

Full text:

ABUJA, Oct. 24, 2007 (Thomson Financial delivered by Newstex) — US drug group Pfizer today urged a Nigerian court to reject a government report that indicted it over a 1996 clinical drug trial on children in the northern town of Kano which Abuja is using as the basis of its suit.

The government in 2001 set up a panel headed by Abdusalami Nasidian, a ministry of health official, to investigate the drug trial and is relying on the report of the inquiry to prosecute a multi-billion-dollar trial against Pfizer.

‘We are in court to quash the Nasidi report which we say is unconstitutional,’ Pfizer’s lawyer Anthony Ndigbe told reporters after the court hearing a federal high court here.

‘It (the report) is seriously in breach of fair hearing. Pfizer was never given the opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses that gave evidence before that panel,’ he said.

‘During the clinical trial itself, Nasidi personally came to the Infectious Diseases Hospital and tried to stop it. He was opposed to it, yet he was the same person appointed to chair the investigation and that report is the basis of the entire case of the federal government,’ the lawyer argued.

The Nigerian government accuses Pfizer of having conducted an unauthorised drug trial on some 200 children at a government hospital in Kano during a 1996 outbreak of epidemics of measles, cholera and meningitis there in which 12,000 people died.

But the government urged the court not to grant Pfizer’s request to reject the report.

‘Our position is that the report should not be quashed because the fact that he (Nasidi) raised objections to the clinical trial does not necessarily create any bias,’ government lawyer Babatunde Irukera said.

Presiding judge Onwuri Chikere adjourned the case to Oct 29 for a further hearing.

The government alleges that the drug test, of Trovan Floxacin, led to the death of 11 children and various deformities — including deafness, blindness, paralysis and brain damage — in 189 others.

Pfizer says the clinical trial was conducted with the full knowledge of the Nigerian government and in a responsible and ethical way.

A similar case has also been filed against the US firm by the Kano state government.