Suffering of Pfizer victims drags on – Families remain uncompensated

The parents of Seventeen-year-old Suwaiba Yusuf are looking for closure 14 years after global pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, used their daughter and 216 other children as guinea pigs without seeking their consent to test a new Trovan drug it was hoping to put out into the market in 1996 at the Infectious Disease Hospital (IDH), Kano […]

The parents of Seventeen-year-old Suwaiba Yusuf are looking for closure 14 years after global pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, used their daughter and 216 other children as guinea pigs without seeking their consent to test a new Trovan drug it was hoping to put out into the market in 1996 at the Infectious Disease Hospital (IDH), Kano during a meningitis outbreak in the state. When it heard of the meningitis outbreak, records say, the Pfizer team quickly flew into the country and set up tent with medical charity Medicins Sans Frontiers and selected 217 children to be administered with the Trovan drugs it was testing then which the company say is capable of killing bugs that have grown resistant to antibiotics but which United States regulators, fearing safety issues, have denied approval for use on children. During the test, some of the children died immediately while others would go ahead to develop various forms of deformities, ranging from memory loss, brain damage, loss of hearing, blindness, persistent joint pain and a host of terrible ailments that have left their existence at subhuman levels.
Now 17-year-old Suwaiba behaves like a three-year-old girl, slobbers over her dress, defecates on a potty chair and cannot stand on her own. Every morning, she is taken out of the house for some air where all she does is to stare vacantly at passersby until evening when she is taken back indoors to prepare for sleep. After a long-drawn legal battle between the Kano State government and the federal government on one hand filing a lawsuit on behalf of the victims, an out-of-court settlement was reached which held out promises for the families of the victims arriving at some form of closure even though no one was punished for wasting the lives of their children.
But even that satisfaction could not be granted them because the same factors that instigated the condemnable drug test (money, greed and commercial interest) are threatening once more to deprive them of the only compensation that for families so poor as they are, they could point out as the only positive thing to come out of their pain and agony. It is also not helpful that the company they are up against has deep connections and money to work its way out of trouble and is not new to controversies of such nature, having had to pay fines in the past over unethical practices by regulators in the United States.
When Pfizer was getting uncomfortable with the way the case against it was proceeding, say representatives of the families of the victims under the aegis of Trovan Victims Forum, TVF, the company used its connections and appealed to some influential Nigerians to convince the victims to agree to compensation terms in settling the matter. A compensation agreement was signed to start payment of compensation on 15, October, 2009 which was later postponed to December, 2010, with the lawyers involved in the legal battle on behalf of the victims and the Kano State government getting $10million and the Kano State government getting $30million which would be used to construct a hospital on behalf of the people of the state. The victims’ compensation is $35million, with each person expected to collect $175, 000, something they are yet to be paid. How much the federal government and its legal team got is still a mystery. Members of the legal team of the federal government say there is a confidentiality agreement between the federal government, its legal team and Pfizer that would not allow it to disclose how much was paid to the federal government as compensation and how the money was disbursed even though such secrecy violates similar practices in Pfizer’s home country, the United States where the company have paid fines as penalties for unethical practices.
Now, with the launch of a hospital in Birnin Kudu in Kano, the Kano State governor, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau has gained enormous political capital as a result of the fallout of the settlement agreement. The governor pointed at the foundation laying ceremony of the hospital that the quest for justice was abandoned by successive governments in the state for ten years before his administration came along and succeeded in getting a settlement. Pfizer too gets the opportunity to spit-shine its image as a caring and responsible corporate entity that has built a hospital for the people of the state, using the opportunity to declare that it is committed to ensuring continued good health for Nigerians. Members of the two committees set up by the state government to handle compensations to the victims and verify their claims have also been receiving very generous allowances for their sittings. An anonymous source told Weekly Trust that the least paid member of the committee goes home with N40, 000 per sitting. The lawyers too are smiling to the bank, $10 million richer. Those still in the sun are the victims and their families who have embarked on another round of waiting.
An official who craved anonymity told Weekly Trust in confidence that “the government’s decision to build the medical centre and pay the litigation fee without paying the victims first was wrong”, saying that “ideally, the victims should have been paid before anything was done”.
At the foundation laying ceremony, amidst all the official fanfare and the presence of well dressed and healthy looking officials from the government and Pfizer, the weather-beaten clothes and gloomy look of the victims and their families is thrown into stark relief. “We the parents are very poor and downtrodden as you can see for yourself from the faces of members of the forum,” said the chairman of TVF, Mustapha Garba Maisikelli. “They are downcast and need urgent settlement in order to address their immediate domestic problems.”
While the face of the struggle is the parents or guardians of the victims, it is the victims themselves and the life they live that makes the most heartbreaking spectacle. The sight of children with overgrown heads and weak limbs is enough to make even the hard hearted weep. Too poor to afford wheel chairs, the parents move them around either backing them or in wheelbarrows. Among the deaf and blind, some were lucky enough to be enrolled in special schools while some have largely been left abandoned without any thought about how their future could be improved.
The permanent wastage wrought on their lives despite the compensation was aptly caught by Governor Shekarau who told the victims to take faith and realize that human life can never be compensated for. Even though such a leap of faith might sound fatalistic, it was the very position adopted by Malam Umaru Jajare who told Weekly Trust that he gave up the quest for compensation when one day when he got to the hospital to look for the file of his daughter, Hadiza Umar who was rendered deaf from the test so that he could stake his claims, he was told her file is missing. “I decided to leave everything and go when I got tired of everything,” he said. He now works in Abuja as a security man for the PHCN and leaves his daughter under the care of her mother and her elder brother, who is still a student, while he tries to make ends meet in Abuja to keep the family going. Friends now advise him to go back and submit to the processes set up the government to prove his claims.
The process of proving the claims prove to be controversial as Pfizer insist on DNA test to verify the true claimants among those who were subjected to its test, saying they are 217. But on the day the claimants were invited to come, 610 people showed up all claiming to have been subjected to the Pfizer test. At a time, the TVF rejected any suggestion of carrying out DNA tests, scoffing at the process because it alleges that experts were not engaged for the test and Pfizer could be looking for a way to prune their number. The victims have also expressed reservation about the membership of Prof. Isa Hashim as the representative of the Kano Emirate council, prompting his replacement with the District head of Fagge, Alhaji Mahmud Ado Bayero.  “Our hope is now restored. And we are in a fresh talk with Pfizer and the state government. By January, we are optimistic that we will see light at the end of the tunnel,” Maisikeli said.
Maisikelli said they have now accepted a new arrangement for DNA tests to be performed to verify the true claimants to the Pfizer compensation package. But sources conversant with the inner workings of the settlement arrangement told Weekly Trust that it was agreed that anyone who came with a victim would be given something, whether or not DNA test was carried out on them. Though that would be an arrangement between the members of the victims’ association who decided on that measure so as to keep everyone satisfied.
In a way, it is becoming something of a painful irony that the whole gory saga is being overshadowed by the compensation claims paid by Pfizer. Even among the victims, Weekly Trust found out, there are some who hold the strong opinion that they would be shortchanged in the end, no matter the assurances all the parties concerned are putting forth at the moment. One of them who craves anonymity because he fears his outspokenness might make him a target for victimization said, “I feel we have been mortgaged and left unprotected while in actual fact we were the victims that were used to get all the compensations.  I remember, when the government confronted Pfizer the company refused to listen to them and asked them to produce victims. They have to come and start looking for us to present to the company.”
Already, there are claims by some group, who say they were the consultants who laid the groundwork for the settlement claims by going out into streets and corners of Kano city to look for the victims and bring them forward that they have not been paid the 5% of settlement payment promised to them for their participation. Zubairu Shaba, the chairman of the group and Kabiru Saidu Funtua, who now is the secretary of TVF were credited as those who kick-fired the initiative at the community level to get justice for the victims. “But now nobody talks about us anymore,” said Shaba.
Pfizer couldn’t have chosen a better country than Nigeria for its test because little or nothing is being said about the devastation of the test and how a similar occurrence could be arrested in future. The company still insists it has sought the consent of the Nigerian government before carrying out its test. Little mention is also made about investigating whether it or other pharmaceutical companies could have engaged in similar practices in the past. Nigeria’s atmosphere of secrecy in governance has shifted the spotlight from Pfizer to the money it is paying. As Suwaiba stares vacantly into space every morning, this is probably the tragedy she is spared from contemplating.