Using unwitting human guinea pigs. This is the very serious accusation that has been falling on the pharmaceutical multinational for some months Bayer, suspected of persuading thousands of patients in India, exploiting poverty and ignorance, to take investigational medicines.
And to have it like this caused death, without the test participants being fully aware of the danger they were in.
Bayer, one of the largest German companies as well as one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, which counts among its medicines the famous aspirin, would thus have caused, according to the Indian Ministry of Health, the death of at least 138 people used as human guinea pigs to test drugs such as Xarelto, whose active ingredient is rivaroxaban, in studies commissioned in the country in the last 4 years.
The people who undergo the tests are extremely poor, desperate and illiterate, ready to sign anything in exchange for a few rupees, especially since in many cases the declaration of consent would have even been signed by a third party. The pharmaceutical company, for its part, avoids acting directly, outsourcing the trial protocols to local authorities.
But why in India? The reasons are not only purely economic, with very low costs for any compensation, with a value of just 5,250 dollars for the relatives of the victims, but also concern the fact that the doctors all speak English, the hospital structure is widespread and efficient and above all, the legislative framework is extremely simplified. As an investigation by the Englishman explained The Independent, precisely on the clinical trials practiced in India, which revealed how over 1,700 people died during or after the trials in the period 2007-2010, since 2005 India has simplified the legislation for the conduct of these tests, prompting many Western pharmaceutical companies to semi-legally involve more and more human guinea pigs, for a total, according to the newspaper, of more than 150,000 people in at least 1,600 tests.
But, after having been an accomplice of the Nazis, with whom she developed many scientific experiments in the concentration camps always with human guinea pigs, Bayer disputes the figures and,
