Doctors who gave sufferers contaminated blood is not going to face justice

Slow progress on the infected blood scandal means that many of those responsible will never see justice, victims of the disaster said, after a report into the atrocity slammed Ken Clarke, Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Bloom.

More than 30,000 people are thought to have been infected with potentially deadly infections from contaminated blood products from 1970 to 1991.

Around 3,000 people have since died from illnesses including HIV, Aids and Hepatitis C, and campaigners have faced a decades-long battle to uncover the truth. 

A landmark report, published on Monday, slammed politicians including Ken Clarke, Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Bloom for continuing to maintain that blood products manufactured from thousands of different donors and imported from the US were safe, despite evidence existing to the contrary.

Now campaigners have said it is a case of ‘justice denied’ as many of those responsible for the deaths have since died themselves, leaving thousands of families bereft. 

The report from Sir Brian Langstaff has found patients were exposed to ‘unacceptable risks’ including the continued import of foreign blood despite the known risks, and then the continued use of blood from high-risk UK populations.

Many of those infected already had serious illnesses such as haemophilia, meaning they needed large quantities of blood from the NHS. 

Thousands of people were infected with HIV before any effective treatment had been found, and entire families faced intense societal stigma which sometimes caused relatives to lose their jobs or be forced to leave the area entirely. 

Speaking after the report was released, The Haemophilia Society chairman Clive Smith said: ‘One of the aspects that sadly, the delay has caused, is the fact that there are doctors out there who should have been prosecuted for manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, doctors who were testing their patients for HIV without consent, not telling them about their infections.

‘Those people should have been in the dock for both gross negligence manslaughter. And sadly, because of the delay, that’s one of the consequences that so many people will not see justice as a result.’

Andy Evans, chairman of the Tainted Blood campaign group, added: ‘This has gone on for so long now that people that were around at the time will be very hard to track down if they’re even still alive.’

The delay ‘really is in this case, justice denied,’ he said.

Sir Brian’s landmark report identified a litany of failures, but pointed the fingers at a series of politicians and experts.

He criticised Margaret Thatcher and her Downing Street successor Sir John Major for ‘cruelly’ using ‘inaccurate, misleading and defensive’ comments about the safety of blood treatment products.

And he said experts such as Professor Arthur Bloom heavily downplayed the risks of AIDS, describing his behaviour as ‘unfathomable’.

The inquiry heard Prof Bloom and fellow expert Dr Charles Rizza said patients should continue to receive blood products that had been pooled multiple sources – sometimes thousands – despite concerns over infection.

Prof Bloom, who was based in Cardiff, continued to say in 1983 that there was ‘no proof’ that commercial concentrates – blood products sourced from multiple donors for money, including drug addicts and prisoners – were the cause of AIDS.

Sir Brian described the expert’s comments, found in documents from the time, as ‘astonishing’, and was similarly aghast that patients were not encouraged to switch to a substantially safer treatment.

He said Prof Bloom ‘materially downplayed the risks of transmission at this critical time’ – despite being aware that one of his own haemophilia patients had AIDS.

And Dr Rizza, director of the Oxford Haemophilia Reference Centre, had three such patients and ‘knew there was a real risk that AIDS could be transmitted by an infectious agent carried by blood products’.

Both men have since died.

Campaigners today said the report ‘brings to an end’ to decades of being ‘gaslit’.

Sir Brian’s 2,572-page tome also criticised the Government, including the late Lady Thatcher, who died in 2013, and is said to have claimed in 1989 that patients ‘had been given the best treatment available’, based on current medical advice, and that the treatment had in fact saved lives.

The report said the claim was repeated by a succession of ministers, until as late as 2009.

Sir Brian said: ‘There was no recognition of anything that might balance the absolutist claim that the treatment was simply the best.

‘In short, adopting the line amounted to blindness. Adopting it without realising it needed to have a proper evidential base, and they did not know what it was, was unacceptable.’

He said the claim ‘became entrenched for around 20 years’, adding: ‘A dogma became a mantra. It was enshrined. It was never questioned.’

He said the ‘best treatment’ line influenced the repeated refusal to hold a public inquiry into the scandal.

He said: ‘The cruelty, for those infected and affected, of hearing over and over that they had received the best treatment available, that testing had been introduced as soon as possible, that they had been inadvertently infected, should not be underestimated.’

And the inquiry chairman said that Sir John – who also used the ‘best treatment’ line – was correct when he told the inquiry the compensation scheme could have been introduced sooner.

But some of the author’s strongest words were reserved for Lord Clarke, the health minister from 1982 to 1985 at the height of the AIDS crisis.

Sir Brian accused Lord Clarke of being ‘unfairly dismissive of, and disparaging towards, many who had suffered physically, mentally, socially and financially from what occurred’.

He described Lord Clarke as ‘combative’, and described his evidence as ‘argumentative’, highlighting how Clarke had repeatedly asked why he had to give ‘any evidence at all’ and that he had been falsely linked to the scandal ‘because I later became a well-known’ figure.

The report also found it was ‘indefensible’ that Lord Clarke – along with other officials – repeated the line that there was ‘no conclusive proof’ that Aids could be spread through blood in 1983.

The inquiry heard the Government decided against compensating patients infected with HIV in the 1980s, with Lord Clarke saying there would be no state compensation for those suffering ‘unavoidable adverse effects’ of medical procedures.

This decision by Lord Clarke was described as ‘ill-considered’, and branding the infections ‘unavoidable’ set the tone for government response for years to come.

Sir Brian said the content of Lord Clarke’s evidence to the inquiry – which came after decades of campaigning for answers – ‘will have aggravated the distress and upset of many’.

He added: ‘Several other ministers, whether serving in a junior or senior role, may have taken positions or expressed views with which others participating in the inquiry might disagree.

‘The inquiry is fortunate that they have done so in a measured, less personalised way, than Lord Clarke did.

‘Indeed, adopting the helpful, responsive or responsible approach to the provision of evidence to a public inquiry into the infection and deaths or thousands of people which the public has the right to expect from former government ministers.’

Clive Smith, chairman of The Haemophilia Society, described Lord Clarke’s evidence as ‘patronising in the extreme’.

He said: ‘I think he owes the community an apology, not just for his time (in office) but for the manner and the lack of humanity and compassion he showed when he gave evidence to this inquiry.’

He said many politicians ‘should hang their heads in shame’.

Mr Smith said: ‘For the first time we’ve seen people like Jeremy Hunt and other (former) Health Secretaries speak up recently, and actually start to acknowledge their part in this scandal.

‘No single person is responsible for this scandal, it has been the result of generations of denial, delay and cover-up. I would expect over the coming days and weeks for many more people to come forward and say: I’m sorry.’

It was a shortage of blood in the UK that led ministers to source cheap batches from the US, where supplies relied on high-risk donors, including drug addicts, from the early 1970s. 

But the products were made by pooling the blood plasma from tens of thousands of donors and a single contaminated donation could be enough to infect an entire batch.

By the mid-1970s there were repeated warnings that the US products carried an increased risk, but it was years before the risks were even publicly acknowledged.

It is estimated that about 6,000 people with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders alone were treated with contaminated products. 

Around 1,250 were infected with HIV, including 380 children. Some unintentionally infected their partners. Fewer than 250 are still alive.

High-profile victims of the scandal include Body Shop founder Anita Roddick and Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies’s mother Sheila, who both contracted hepatitis C following transfusions of infected blood. 

Ms Davies broke down in tears on TV today as she told how her mother had developed liver cancer in her forties after being given contaminated blood during an operation, while Dame Anita’s daughter Samantha called the scandal ‘a collective injustice’.