Infected Blood Report Finds Huge Cover-Up That Led to Sick Children Being Treated Like “Guinea Pigs” and 3,000 Avoidable Deaths

The infected blood scandal was “not an accident” but the result of a series of shocking failures followed by a “pervasive” cover-up, a scathing report into the biggest treatment disaster in NHS history concluded today. The Mail has more.

More than 3,000 have died and many continue to suffer after tens of thousands of vulnerable patients were infected with HIV and hepatitis from contaminated blood products during the 1970s and early 1990s.

A damning report today identifies a litany of failures covering multiple governments, prominent politicians and health organisations, with victims repeatedly lied to, misled and ignored, and children treated like “objects for research”.

Inquiry chairman Sir Brian Langstaff’s 2,527-page report was published this afternoon after decades of brave campaigning from victims and their families.

His searing findings will heap further pressure on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to immediately settle the estimated £10 billion compensation bill for those affected.

Sir Brian said that the contaminated blood disaster is “still happening” because patients who suffered “life-shattering” infections continue to die every week.

He said: “In families across the U.K., people were treated by the NHS and over 30,000 were given infections which were life-shattering. Three thousand people have already died and that number is climbing week by week. Lives, dreams, friendships, families, finances were destroyed.

“What I have found is that disaster was no accident. People put their trust in doctors and the Government to keep them safe and that trust was betrayed.

“Then the Government compounded that agony by telling them that nothing wrong had been done, that they’d had the best available treatment and that as soon as tests were available they were introduced and both of those statements were untrue.

“That’s why what I’m recommending is that compensation must be paid now and I have made various other recommendations to help make the future of the NHS better and treatment safer.”

Key failures highlighted in the report include:

• A failure to act over risks linked to contaminated blood – some of which were known before the NHS was established in 1948;
• The slowness of the response to the scandal; for instance, it was apparent by mid-1982 that there was a risk that the cause of Aids could be transmitted by blood and blood products but the government failed to take steps to reduce that risk;
• Tests on blood were not introduced as quickly as they could have been;
• Patients and the wider public were given false reassurances;
• People with bleeding disorders were treated without proper consent and research was carried out on them without their knowledge;
• Children with bleeding disorders who attended Treloar College, where pupils with haemophilia were treated at an on-site NHS centre, were treated as “objects for research”. The report said these children were given “multiple, riskier” treatments. Other children with bleeding disorders were also given treatment “unnecessarily”;
• Regulatory failures, including the licensing of dangerous products, and failure to remove them from the market when concerns were raised;
• Instead of ensuring a sufficient supply of U.K.-made treatments for haemophilia, the NHS continued to import the blood clotting blood plasma treatment Factor VIII from the U.S. – where manufacturers paid high-risk donors, including prison inmates and drug users. The U.K. blood services continued to collect blood donations from prisons until 1984;
• In terms of blood transfusions, blood donors were not screened properly and there were delays in blood screening. Too many transfusions were given when they were not necessarily needed.

Worth reading in full.

Too many of these failures echo those being raised by doctors and other experts in relation to the rushed Covid vaccines – the latest in a string of major medical scandals. When will people learn that their beloved NHS doesn’t love them back? Powerful interests in medicine conspire to keep patients in the dark about what’s really going on – perhaps in the hope that they’ll be long gone with the profits and paycheques before the public learns the truth.