Short thread:

We do need more Africans involved in the process of vaccine creation but then again it becomes complicated when you add big pharma, whiteness in Africa, lack of accountability and corruption.

Fernando Meirelles' 2005 film The Constant Gardener was a big hit which was shot in Kenya. It racked up over $30m. The plot was based off the 2001 book by John le Carré.

The novel tells the story of Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose activist wife is murdered. Believing there is something behind the murder, he seeks to uncover the truth and finds an international conspiracy of corrupt bureaucracy and pharmaceutical money.

The conspiracy around big pharma is that the drug companies that are pour AIDS drugs into Africa, are using their programs to mask the testing of other drugs.

The story isn't far fetched though and is loosely based on a real life case in Kano, Nigeria.

Abdullahi v. Pfizer, Inc, 1996.

The Kano trovafloxacin trial litigation arose out of a clinical trial conducted by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer in 1996 in Kano, Nigeria, during an epidemic of meningococcal meningitis.

To test its new antibiotic, trovafloxacin (Trovan), Pfizer gave 100 children trovafloxacin, while another 100 received the gold-standard anti-meningitis treatment, ceftriaxone, a cephalosporin antibiotic.

Pfizer gave the children a substantially reduced dose of the ceftriaxone relative to that described on the US FDA-approved prescribing information. The allegation is that this was done to skew the test in favor of its own drug.

Pfizer claimed that the dose used was sufficient even though a clinical trial performed by Médecins Sans Frontières recommends a higher dose.

Five children given trovafloxacin died, as did six of those given ceftriaxone.

The lead investigator, Dr. Abdulhamid Isa Dutse, later provided a letter of approval for human trials that was found to be falsified.

It has been alleged that participants and their families were not told that they were part of a trial, and that Médecins Sans Frontières was offering the standard treatment in another part of the same building

The survivors of the trial tried to bring a number of legal actions against Pfizer in the United States. These resulted in four judicial opinions, the first three dismissing the claims on procedural grounds.

Pfizer argued that it was not required to obtain informed consent for experimental drug trials in Africa, and that any case should be heard in Nigeria

In 2009 the US Court of Appeal ruled that the Nigerian victims+families were entitled to bring suit against Pfizer in the US under the Alien Tort Statute. Pfizer subsequently settled the case out of court with a $75 million settlement that was subject to a confidentiality clause

Overall, the 1996 meningitis epidemic in northern Nigeria killed about 12,000 people, during the worst known meningitis outbreak in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Africans need to be involved in medical research as test subjects but not as guinea pigs and the difference comes in accountability and oversight and many of our governance have a loose relationship with both of those terms.

We live in a country where health funds have been plundered and people are dying and suffering because #COVID19 emergency funds are in people's Bank accounts. Your lives have a number attached to it. Do you think the same regulatory bodies and government will defend you?