British authorities and the country’s public health service knowingly exposed tens of thousands of patients to deadly infections.
This is said to have happened through contaminated blood and blood products, concealing the truth for decades, an inquiry into the UK’s infected blood scandal revealed on Monday.
An estimated 3,000 people in the United Kingdom are believed to have died, and many others were left with lifelong illnesses after receiving blood or blood products tainted with HIV or hepatitis from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
The scandal is considered the deadliest disaster in the history of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) since its inception in 1948.
Former judge Brian Langstaff, who chaired the inquiry, criticized successive governments and medical professionals for “a catalogue of failures” and refusal to admit responsibility to save face and expense.
He found that deliberate attempts were made to conceal the scandal, and there was evidence of government officials destroying documents.
“This disaster was not an accident.
The infections happened because those in authority, doctors, the blood services, and successive governments, did not put patient safety first,” Langstaff said.
“The response of those in authority served to compound people’s suffering.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak apologized to the victims, stating the report’s publication marked “a day of shame for the British state.”
“Today’s report shows a decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life.
From the National Health Service to the civil service to ministers in successive governments, at every level, the people and institutions in which we place our trust failed in the most harrowing and devastating way,” Sunak told a packed and silent House of Commons.
“I am truly sorry.”
Campaigners have fought for decades to bring official failings to light and secure government compensation.
The inquiry was finally approved in 2017, and over the past four years, it reviewed evidence from more than 5,000 witnesses and over 100,000 documents.
Many of those affected were people with hemophilia, a condition affecting the blood’s ability to clot.
In the 1970s, patients were given a new treatment that the UK imported from the United States.
Some of the plasma used to make the blood products was traced to high-risk donors, including prison inmates, who were paid to give blood samples.
Because manufacturers of the treatment mixed plasma from thousands of donations, one infected donor could compromise the entire batch.
The report stated around 1,250 people with bleeding disorders, including 380 children, were infected with HIV-tainted blood products.
Three-quarters of them have died. Up to 5,000 others who received the blood products developed chronic hepatitis C, a type of liver infection.
An estimated 26,800 others were also infected with hepatitis C after receiving blood transfusions, often given in hospitals after childbirth, surgery, or an accident.
Sunak vowed to “right this historic wrong” and announced that details of a compensation package, expected to total £10 billion ($12.7 billion), would be disclosed on Tuesday.
The report highlighted that many of the deaths and illnesses could have been avoided if the government had addressed the risks associated with blood transfusions or the use of blood products.
Since the 1940s and the early 1980s, it had been known that hepatitis and the cause of AIDS, respectively, could be transmitted this way, the inquiry noted.
Langstaff criticized officials in the UK for failing to ensure rigorous blood donor selection and screening of blood products, unlike a long list of developed countries.
At one school attended by children with hemophilia, public health officials gave the children “multiple, riskier” treatments as part of the research, the report revealed.
He added that authorities “compounded the agony by refusing to accept that wrong had been done,” falsely telling patients they had received the best treatment available and that blood screening had been introduced at the earliest opportunity.
When people were found to be infected, officials delayed informing them about what had happened.
Andy Evans, of the campaign group Tainted Blood, expressed his frustration, saying, “We have been gaslit for generations.
This report today brings an end to that.
It looks to the future as well and says this cannot continue.”
Diana Johnson, a lawmaker who has long campaigned for the victims, emphasized the need for accountability.
“There has to be accountability for the actions that were taken, even if it was 30, 40, 50 years ago,” she said, though acknowledging that some key players may have died since the investigations began.
