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Pfizer Facing 4 Court Cases in Nigeria
Ali Ahmad, who brought a class action suit on behalf of Kano subjects against Pfizer in the U.S., said he also wanted to sue the Nigerian government, but no government workers would testify.
The U.S. suit was turned down in New York for lack of jurisdiction, though Ahmad said lawyers are in the process of appealing and refiling the case.
  Anas Mustapha foreground who was one of the children tested with the meningitis epidemic experimental drug and now suffering brain damage stands near the entrance of their house in Kano, Nigeria Thursday, July 19, 2007 New York-based Pfizer is facing four court cases two filed by the federal government , two by the state in Nigeria over a decade-old drug trial in the northern Muslim city of Kano. It is accused of using a 1996 meningitis epidemic to push through a sloppily managed study without the full understanding of the parents or the proper regulatory approval. AP Photo/George Osodi) (George Osodi - AP) |
He argues that the Nigerian government is now taking advantage of the families' plight to enrich itself. A victory in the Nigerian cases will not mean money for families, but for government coffers in a country that watchdog groups routinely call one of the most corrupt in the world. The federal government is seeking $7 billion in damages and the state government $2 billion; they each have filed one criminal case and one civil suit.
Government lawyers say they were slow to file charges because the details of the 1996 trial have been hard to get from Pfizer. They claim that the administration was duped along with the study subjects.
"What the government did was to give Pfizer the benefit of the doubt, and obviously naively trusted Pfizer," said government prosecutor Babatunde Irukera.
Six years after the meningitis outbreak, a Kano doctor printed out a series of diatribes he found on the Internet calling the polio vaccine a Western plot to reduce the world's Muslim population. Many of the area's influential Muslim clerics took up the cause and led a 16-month boycott.
Local officials say Kano was primed to believe the rumors. Residents already found it strange that they were given free polio doses but nothing for bigger killers like malaria and measles. And the Pfizer controversy was still simmering.
"When people heard about (the Pfizer charges), they started really hiding their children," said Alhahi Ibrahim Jibrin Mai-Anguwa, head of a 3,000-person neighborhood ward in Kano.
The state governor stopped the vaccination program while doses were sent abroad for testing, a move that shocked the West but may actually be the bright spot in Kano's story -- an official listening to the concerns of his constituency. When test results confirmed the vaccine was safe, people began to embrace it again.
But some damage can't be erased.
Twice a week, mothers arrive in the physical therapy ward of a Kano hospital carrying children with the jerking legs and lifeless arms of polio for massages and sessions under heat lamps.
Four-year-old Fatima Yau, whose mother refused to have her immunized in 2003, lies on the examination table with legs splayed out flat and unresponsive.
Her mother says she's hopeful for Fatima's future. Her daughter just started school. She's carried to classes each morning on an older sibling's back.
