Justin Arenstein and Ongeri John
The two South African Aids quacks who were booted out of Tanzania last week left behind a string of debts, including a R68 000 telephone bill.
Jacques Zigi Visser and Themba Khumalo were deported last Saturday in the wake of mounting controversy about their role in trials of the discredited anti-Aids drug Virodene PO58 on human subjects at the Lugalo military hospital.
The trials on 64 military patients were branded illegal after Tanzania’s National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) declined authorisation for human testing, and the country’s Pharmaceutical Board confirmed that researchers had failed to register Virodene.
Visser and Khumalo were escorted to the Dar es Salaam international airport from their luxury rented house by a team of senior immigration officials on Saturday, after the country’s home affairs ministry refused to renew their visas.
They left behind a $7780 telephone bill with the Tanzania Telecommunication Company, a similar unpaid account with local cellular telephone companies, their Dar es Salaam house, various rented vehicles and confused staff.
Visser and Khumalo also ignored requests for a written report on their status and activities in Tanzania by South Africa’s High Commissioner Theresa Solomon.
A defiant Visser said from his Pretoria home on Wednesday, however, that the deportation was part of a plot by global pharmaceutical companies afraid of the potential impact of Virodene.
Visser and his wife, medical technician Olga Visser, have trumpeted Virodene as a miracle anti-AIDS drug despite worldwide concern that its active ingredient, dimethyl formamide, is a highly toxic industrial solvent banned for use on humans.
“It’s a smear. Our work is top secret so I can’t say much, but large international pharmaceutical companies and elements of the media are afraid of Virodene. We have had excellent results so far and will begin our final phase-three human trials on 120 subjects within six months. We expect to be ready for global registration within 18 months,” said Visser.
Visser readily admitted his debts in Tanzania but refused to disclose the financial backers of his South African-registered Virodene Pharmaceutical Holdings (VPH), and also declined to release the results of initial drug trials in the United Kingdom and Germany, or of the most recent Tanzanian tests.
“Powerful people would attempt to [discredit] the results if we released them now. We intend releasing everything together once we have finalised all trials, when no one can argue with us,” said Visser.
“Just the fact that our funders are prepared to invest millions of dollars in Virodene research should be enough to convince the sceptics. These kinds of trials would have cost up to $600-million in America.”
Visser also dismissed Tanzanian government criticism of the trials as “political opportunism and infighting”.
“We have contracted the Tanzania People’s Defence Forces to conduct the clinical work and have the authority of the army medical board. This overrules the civilian NIMR and health ministry,” said Visser.
“We are also just the paymasters in the trials, with large British, American and Czech companies such as [Quintiles Transnational] doing the actual tests.”
Quintiles’ general manager for clinical research in Africa, Dr Willie Conradie, last week denied that the company, the largest medical research organisation in the world, was in any way connected to Virodene or VPH.
Visser refused to comment any further on-the-record, but promised that VPH’s American publicist Larry Heidebrecht would convene a major press briefing within two weeks.
Tanzania’s home affairs permanent secretary Bernard Mchomvu meanwhile stressed on Wednesday that both Visser and Khumalo had been illegal immigrants after failing to voluntarily leave Tanzania when the government refused to renew their visas. African Eye News Service