By Abdulyassar Abdulhamid
That the Ivorian professional football player, Didier Drogba and the former Cameroonian player, Samuel Eto’o, countered a French doctor, Jean-Paul Mira, for his racist comments, telling him that “Africa isn’t a testing lab”, is commendable but not enough.
Mira, a Paris-based intensive care doctor and Camille Locht, research head at France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) based in Lille made their feelings apparent in a live broadcast on channel LCI.
Mira, as reported by Reuters, posed the question: “Shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatment, no intensive care, rather as was done with certain studies on AIDS, where things are tested on prostitutes because it’s known that they are highly exposed (to HIV)?”
His co-traveler, Lotch replied in the affirmative: “You’re right, we are thinking in parallel by the way about a study in Africa with the same kind of approach, (but) it doesn’t prevent us from being able to think about a study in Europe and Australia at the same time.”
What the African continent now needs is identity, capacity for thought and purposive actions driven by good leadership. Coronavirus has disclosed many things that were hitherto kept secret.
Jean-Paul Mira’s suggestion that a ‘repurposed’ tuberculosis vaccine considered for Coronavirus treatment be tested on Africans is not something new. Racism is prevalent, with Africans always as the main target.
What is surprising is how the so much referenced ‘humanity’ is sacrificed on the altar of racism that Robert W. Whaples once asked, “Are humans intrinsically valuable or just a cosmic accident without meaning or purpose?” In modern era, so to speak, he added, many ideas have signed humanity’s death warrant; and racism is the chief among them. There were genocide, man-made diseases, wars and weapons of mass destruction invented – including the biological ones.
Mira’s tone (his attitude towards the subject matter) qualifies him as a ruthlessly inhuman man who would not care if black race were to be wiped out of the surface of the earth over night – an idea reminiscent of how colonialism and slave-trade destroyed millions of Africans on their own lands.
To be blunt, Mira’s worldview of Africa is racist as it is ill-intentioned. As of Thursday, April 9, there are 11,310 total cases of COVID-19 in Africa, 1,351 persons recovered and 570 confirmed deaths. Contrastingly, in France alone, there are 82,048 confirmed cases – in the United States 423,791, in Spain 148,220, in Italy 139,422, in Germany 113,296, etc.
Statistically, the total number of confirmed cases of the infection in Africa is not up to one-sevenths of France’s, one-tenths of Spain and Italy’s, let alone the US’s; but Mira couldn’t suggest that the trial be conducted in any of these countries, or anywhere on earth, but Africa. Is there a country on earth with enough testing equipment or protective gears? Germany?
Less we forget, in 1996 Kano State was faced, as carefully documented by Ike Iyioke in his Clinical trials and African persons: A Quest to Re-Conceptualize Responsibility, with devastating epidemic of cerebral-spinal and bacterial meningitis, measles and cholera.
Pfizer, an American pharmaceutical company learnt about the outbreak of the diseases on the news and dispatched a team to a local hospital providing treatment. As if from the blues, Trovan was administered to a large number of pediatric patients by Pfizer as part of its efforts to test the effectiveness of the drug for the treatment of meningitis.
That was a drug that had never been tested on human subjects anywhere in the world. The mischievous experiment took place at the same hospital where a medical team of Medicine Sans Frontieres was already providing free medical outreach (treatment) to the patients in question with Ceftriaxone, an internationally recognized and recommended antibiotic for treating meningitis.
The aftermath, as reported by a Nigerian government’s investigation, ranged from adverse drug reaction to death. Many of the subjects died henceforth, and those who survived were reduced to permanent disabilities: brain damage, paralysis, muteness, slurred speech and blindness.
One thing that is left out with regards to Pfizer’s scandal, as reported by The Atlantic, is that the Trovan team flew in to Kano on a charted jet, headed straight away to the hospital, ran the test on the hapless children; and, two weeks later, flew out of Kano without the their data. Why? Only five out of 100 subjects survived.
Pfizer took advantage of the circumstances arising from the medical crises as an opportunity to quickly conduct the study on the children. It could not obtain permission for the trial anywhere else in the world. No any assent was obtained from either the children or their parents, nor had they received the necessary approval from the authorities concerned.
The damage had been done. A series of lawsuits filed in the US since 2001 failed. Only a $75 million out-of-court settlement was truck for the claims related to the deathly experiment. But has that been honoured?
This left many of us with no choice but to accept The Atlantic’s argument in a report entitled “Did Pfizer Bribe Its Way Out of Criminal Charges in Nigeria?” in which it cited Wikileaks’s release of U.S Department cables which implicated the pharmaceutical industry, suggesting that Pfizer had blackmailed the head of the Nigerian Ministry of Justice into dropping a $6 billion criminal lawsuit.
To date, there are many unanswerable questions with regard to the motives behind the clinical trial that claimed lives and subject scores to permanent disability. We just watched and left the questions begging for answers in the recesses of our mind. Humanity has been slaughtered on the altar of racism. What a world!
On leadership, most African countries’, if not all, political and economic systems are decrepit. The ruling class has a strong hold on power that they have personalized everything. For this extreme poverty has continued to rule in many parts of the continent that many children suffer from malnutrition and growth disorders.
As the novel Coronavirus comes ravaging even countries with stronger healthcare system, chronic underfunding of the health care system, low pay (that leads to brain drain) remain the indelible features of the African health care system.
As of 2019, for instance, Nigeria’s physician-to-patient ratio is four doctors per 10,000 patients; and yet seeing a doctor is not one-off thing, as patients often wait for hours in line before they are attended to.
If all people are alike in their bodies as in their minds and each has a brain, a spleen and lungs, as Ivan Turgenev suggested, why must some people just because of the colour of their skin turn to Africa to satisfy their clinical trial desires?
Abdulhamid wrote via abdulhiyassar2013@gmail.com
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Sky Daily
