
Fault Lines - Outsourced - Clinical Trials Overseas
US pharmaceutical companies have spent the last decade moving clinical trials out of American labs and into India, Russia, China, Brazil, Poland, Uganda, and Romania, chasing lower costs and fewer regulatory hurdles. Al Jazeera's Fault Lines team follows the money into India specifically, where a $30 billion clinical research industry has taken root, built on established hospitals, a government eager to attract foreign pharmaceutical work, and a large population of poor, often illiterate volunteers willing to enroll in drug trials. The film examines how consent forms get explained, or don't, to people with little formal education, and whether the FDA can meaningfully oversee testing happening thousands of miles from its jurisdiction. It sets that question against the scale of the industry itself, one that has quietly become central to how new drugs reach American pharmacies. The reporting stays with the mechanics of outsourcing rather than any single dramatic incident, tracing how a trial designed in a US boardroom ends up running in an Indian clinic.