Chris Green MP: contaminated blood scandal

The British National Health Service bought contaminated blood products from a company in the United States who paid criminals and illegal drug users for donations. From about 1970, for many years, diseased blood and blood products were shipped around the world and given to haemophiliacs, those with other medical conditions or who needed a transfusion due to blood loss due to an accident.

It was known in the 1950s and 60s that sourcing blood products from populations highly likely to carry a range of diseases would put those receiving them at risk of infection, serious illness and death. When the threat was from Hepatitis B, the risk was thought to be acceptable but the approach was not changed when the far more dangerous Hepatitis C and HIV emerged.

National Health Service doctors, academic professors, senior civil servants then chose to cover it up for many years until finally Theresa May, as Prime Minister, commissioned Sir Brian Langstaff to investigate and report on how the NHS gave infected blood to 30.000 people.

There was even a boarding school set up for haemophiliac children where the parents thought that they would receive the best care and treatment but were instead used as experimental test subjects.

Children were even used because chimpanzees were considered too expensive to use as test subjects.

The Prime Minister and leader of the opposition were both clear that this is a failure of all the main political parties over a period of decades but there is more to it than that.

Ministers were lied to by civil servants. Records of meeting have been destroyed by civil servants and others to hide the truth.

Why?

What reason would the NHS, Doctors, and civil servants have to cover this up from one minister to the next, from one government to the next?

This will continue to be revealed over the coming months.

We will hear that awful phrase of “lessons will be learnt” but can we really expect a fundamental shift in the values of the elites at the top of so many institutions?

Within health, we only have to look at the Cumberlege Review into the use of Primodos, Sodium Valproate and pelvic mesh to see how difficult it is to get honesty within the current health system.

What of the Countess of Chester hospital where a nurse killed seven babies and tried to kill many more? When some doctors and consultants raised the alarm Lucy Letby was protected by the management and given a promotion to a different hospital.

Mid Staffordshire Hospital is a totemic symbol of failure and cover up.

The elites protecting themselves during the Post Office Horizon scandal shows that it is not just the NHS that needs profound change.