In the colonial era, Africa provided model precincts for testing new vaccines. In the 1950s, white colonial overlords rolled out the red carpet for pharmaceutical companies to perform vaccine experiments on compliant test subjects numbering in the millions. Drug companies spend some 90 percent of their drug development costs on Phase III human trials.4 Every trial delay eats into the critical time period when the product enjoys patent protection. In the 1980s, Pharma therefore moved most of its clinical trials to poor nations where human guinea pigs are cheap and even the most severe injuries
...more
