GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s second largest drug maker was fined $93,000 for what the Associated Press and other Main Stream Media outlets in the United States are calling “paperwork errors” (here). Unfortunately, the paperwork in question had to do with the recruitment of poor children of illiterate parents into a vaccine trial that some say, claimed the lives of fourteen infants.
Judge Marcelo Aguinsky also fined two of the trials investigators $70,000 each for their role in the deception because the consent forms that are required by law in Argentina were signed by illiterate parents and in some cases by adults who had no custodial rights over the children.
GSK and Argentine Health Officials state that there are no links between the experimental vaccine and the death of the fourteen babies in the drug trial. A spokesperson for ANMAT, Argentina’s equivalent to the United State’s FDA, even went so far as to claim that “All of these patients had been given a placebo – that’s to say, something that appeared to be the vaccine but that had no active ingredients. The vaccine is safe.”