RISHI Sunak has said the infected blood scandal should “shake our nation to its core” as he delivered an historic government apology.
The PM today pledged comprehensive compensation to the thousands of victims and their families – vowing: “Whatever it costs to deliver this scheme, we will pay.”
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The unprecedented disaster saw patients contract Hepatitis C and HIV while they were receiving NHS care between the 1970s and 1990s.
Today a long-awaited report by Sir Brian Langstaff found there was a culture of “institutional defensiveness” which contributed to the scale of the scandal.
The compensation payments are set to reach around £10billion and will be laid out by ministers on Tuesday.
On behalf of every successive government since the scandal unfolded, Mr Sunak said he was “truly sorry”.
In a statement this afternoon, he told the Commons: “This is a day of shame for the British state.”
“Today’s report shows a decade’s long moral failure at the heart of our national life.
“From the National Health Service to the civil service, to ministers and successive governments, at every level, the people and institutions in which we place our trust failed in the most harrowing and devastating way.
“They failed the victims and their families and they failed this country.
“Sir Brian finds a catalogue of systemic collective and individual failures, each on its own serious. And taken together, amounting to a calamity. And the result of this inquiry should shake our nation to its core.”
Some of victims and their families were in the Commons chamber during the PM’s statement.
Addressing them directly, Mr Sunak said: “I want to make a wholehearted and unequivocal apology for this terrible injustice.”
NATIONAL DISGRACE
Sir Brian’s report ruled that the government realised people could be infected with HIV through contaminated blood transfusions going back to 1982.
Sir Brian said this was known by “all haemophilia doctors” but a test to screen any blood donations was not in place until October 1985.
More than 30,000 people were infected with deadly viruses – with campaigners today saying the final report was “the beginning of the end” in their fight for justice.
The report revealed that more than 1,000 people who had bleeding disorders were infected with HIV with 75 per cent of them losing their lives.
NHS blood scandal: The report’s key findings
IN a damning seven-volume report, Chair of the Infected Blood Inquiry Sir Brian Langstaff concluded that MPs, doctors and the NHS conducted a “chilling cover-up.
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.
- There were delays informing people about their infections – sometimes for years – and they were told in “insensitive” and “inappropriate” ways.
- Patients were “cruelly” told repeatedly that they had received the best treatment available.
- 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 UK-made treatments for haemophilia, the NHS continued to import the blood clotting blood plasma treatment Factor VIII from the US – where manufacturers paid high-risk donors, including prison inmates and drug users. The UK 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.
Mr Sunak said: “This should have been avoided. “It was known these treatments were contaminated. warnings were ignored, repeatedly.
“Time and again. People in positions of power and trust had the chance to stop the transmission of those infections. Time and again, they failed to do so.”
Mr Sunak was backed by Sir Keir Starmer who also apologised for Labour’s part in the scandal.
Campaigners today called for some of the doctors and NHS officials responsible to face prosecution.
Des Collins, a senior partner at Collins Solicitors, which is representing nearly 1,500 families, told The Sun that the NHS Trust which employed Professor Bloom – who is criticised repeatedly in the report – should refer themselves to the CPS.
Clive Smith, chairman of The Haemophilia Society, said the finding is “no surprise” and is something campaigners have known for decades.
He added: “I think many of the politicians should hang their heads in shame.”
“No single person is responsible for this scandal. It’s been the result of generations of denial, delay and cover-up.”
Sir Brian was given a huge round of applause by the families listening to his conclusions held at Westminster Central Hall, in central London.
He added that any apology by Ministers must be accompanied by “action”.
The former High Court judge said an apology by the government had to respect “not just the suffering but that the suffering was the result of errors, wrongs done and delays incurred”.
The inquiry also found that the government has compounded the misery of victims with the “sluggish pace” and lack of transparency on compensation.
He also added that administrations of all stripes had offered a “litany of failures” from the early 1970s with no action taken.
Failings to act took place as it became known that collections of blood from prisons led to disease.
Sir Brian added: “People whose lives were torn apart by the wrongs done at individual, collective and systemic levels, and by the way in which successive governments responded to what happened, still have no idea as to the shape, extent or form of any compensation scheme.”
The full extent of the compensation scheme will be spelled out by the government on Tuesday.
Condemning the indecision by successive leaders, Sir Brian said: “Whilst the Government deliberated, those infected with AIDS through transfusion were suffering and dying.”
No single person is responsible for this scandal. It’s been the result of generations of denial, delay and cover-up
Clive Smith, chairman of The Haemophilia Society
There was a “defensive closing of ranks” in the NHS after it came to light that patients being treated for haemophilia and other disorders were actually being infected with HIV and hepatitis through transfusions from 1970 onwards.
The father of a boy who was infected with hepatitis C said: “The NHS should have been much more open about what was happening from the beginning.
“It felt like a closed shop right from the start, no one knew what was going on and there was no information out there.
“There was nobody willing to take any responsibility for what had happened and that’s not right.”
In a key finding, Sir Brian states that the delay in a Government response to what was happening only increased the suffering dealt to victims and their families.
A pervasive attitude of “doctor knows best” meant that the Department of Health repeatedly chose not to issue guidance to stop the unsafe use of infected blood.
There was a “slow and inadequate response to taking precautions” even when “the writing was on the wall”.
The Inquiry also found that the blood services themselves were “slow to react” to the threat of AIDS” and did “too little, too late”.
Government fear of setting a precedent for compensation schemes “outweighed considerations of moral responsibility or compassion”, the Inquiry found.
Officials had decided at the outset not to provide compensation to victims of the scandal with thousands of people dying without receiving a penny.
There was a cover-up of what had happened to thousands of men, women and children “not in the sense of a handful of people plotting in an orchestrated conspiracy to mislead”, but in a “subtle, more pervasive and more chilling” way.
The report states: “In this way there has been a hiding of much of the truth.“The people most directly affected said there was more to what happened than was in the public domain and they were correct.
“And yet it has taken decades to get an authoritative account of what happened to cause so many deaths, prolonged and wasting illnesses, and infections: and it is still not a full account since so many key witnesses have died and documents have been lost.”
The infected blood scandal in numbers
IT’S thought that tens of thousands of people in the UK were infected with contaminated blood between the 1970s and early 1990s.
Statisticians advising the Infected Blood Inquiry have come up with a number of different figures about how many people have been infected, but they have stressed there is “considerable uncertainty about the conclusions”.
Commentators have suggested that the figures – particularly those around hepatitis C infections – should be seen as a “starting point”.
According to the inquiry’s Statistics Expert Group:
- Around 1,250 people with bleeding disorders such as haemophilia were infected with HIV through infected blood products.
- Some 80 to 100 people were infected with HIV as a result of a blood transfusion – which could have been given following an accident, during surgery, during childbirth or another medical procedure.
- Between 3,650 and 6,250 people with bleeding disorders were infected with hepatitis C – this includes 1,250 people who were infected with both HIV and hepatitis C.
- Some 26,800 people were infected with hepatitis C as a result of having a blood transfusion – though statisticians said this number could vary anywhere between 21,300 and 38,800 people.
- Some 22,000 of these were deemed to be chronically infected as they survived more than six months after their transfusion.
- Among people who received hepatitis C as a result of a blood transfusion, 64 per cent were women.
- Of the 26,800 hepatitis C infections which occurred as a result of a blood transfusion, 22,000 were among patients in England, 2,740 occurred in Scotland, 1,320 in Wales, and 730 patients were infected in Northern Ireland.
- Five people were infected with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, causing brain damage. They all died.
- The figures do not include people who were “indirectly infected” – such as a partner who caught HIV from a loved one who had been given contaminated blood or a blood product.
- Statisticians said that it is not possible to estimate the numbers of hepatitis B virus infections with “reasonable accuracy”.
It’s been estimated that 3,000 people have died as a result of the infections, while others live with ongoing side effects of infection.