Global pharmaceutical firms that supplied products involved in Britain’s contaminated blood scandal are being urged by MPs and campaigners to cough up and contribute towards the UK’s whopping £10bn compensation bill.
They want the government to pursue action against drug firms that to date have not paid any compensation in the country.
Their products were contaminated with viruses that included HIV and hepatitis C.
The Guardian reports that the official inquiry has concluded that the contaminated product manufactured by subsidiaries of Bayer, Baxter and other drug groups to treat haemophilia did not contain adequate warnings and should never have been licensed.
About 3 000 people died and 30 000 were infected after being given contaminated transfusions and tainted blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the deaths were caused by commercial blood products given to haemophiliacs to replace a clotting protein called factor VIII.
MP Diana Johnson, chair of the UK’s all-party parliamentary group on haemophilia and contaminated blood, said: “The pharmaceutical companies need to apologise and there needs to be a claim against them for some of this money.”
In other countries, she added, claimants had been given payouts of hundreds of millions of pounds and it was “outrageous” similar payments had not been made in the UK.
The government has set out details on the infected blood compensation scheme with payments to victims of up to £2 735 000.
Japan and America
In Japan, in March 1996, drug firm executives involved in the global blood scandal were photographed bowing on their knees to haemophiliacs who had filed lawsuits that led to a settlement.
The firms, including subsidiaries of Bayer and Baxter, agreed to pay 60% of a settlement worth up to $810m, with payments of $450 000 for each person infected with HIV.
In America, drug firms that included Bayer, Baxter and Armour, which were all accused of selling infected products, agreed to a $640m settlement for haemophiliacs in August 1996. They, and others, were also required to contribute to a settlement package established in Germany in July 1995.
The prospects of pharmaceutical firms agreeing to similar payouts to victims in the UK were undermined by the insistence for years by ministers and officials that patients were given the “best available treatment”.
The investigation found this claim was wrong and that the treatment disaster could largely have been avoided.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
UK’s NHS could cough up billions in infected blood scandal payments
Inquiry: Infected blood given to UK patients after safe-date cutoff?
Swifter justice urged in NHS infected blood scandal