Infected blood inquiry scandal live: Victims betrayed by cover-up, inquiry says – BBC News

Langstaff says that very early on in the inquiry it became clear that most people were not given enough information about risks to give their informed consent.

He adds that they weren’t given information about alternative treatments.

He lists a number of failures including the failure of clinicians to tell people of the risks of infection from blood or blood products, to tell them of alternative treatments.

“These failures were widespread.”

Earlier, Sir Brian said that blood donors should have been better selected.

“For instance, in 1975 the chief medical officer for England said the practice of collecting blood in prisons could continue even though prisoners were known to have higher numbers of hepatitis infections – and this practice was not ended in the UK until 1984.”

Langstaffsays 1,250 people with breathing disorders were also infected with HIV – nearly a third of those were children.

“Three quarters of those with HIV have died,” Langstaff adds as he says the number of people in the auditorium just now represent the number of those infected.

“Now picture only a quarter of you here,” he continues.

He says responses to concerns in the 1980s – noting an HIV epidemic in the US making its way to the UK through blood transported products – consisted of “denials, disbelief and delay”.

“The government’s response was unconscionably slow,” he adds.

Langstaffsays in May 1983 the Mail on Sunday put “Hospitals using killer blood” – as he notes heavy criticism of the influence and actions of Cardiff-based haematologist Prof Arthur Bloom.

Langstaff refers to the government’s claim that screening for hepatitis C began as soon as the technology was available.

In doing so, he says, it ignored all the countries that introduced screening before the UK. This amounts to 23 countries in total – including Japan, Finland and Spain.

He adds that “you might have thought” that as soon as a screening test was introduced donors who were infected and might not have realised would have been identified and told.

It took around four years for a general look back and it followed one transfusion director in Scotland who arranged a look back in his area – Sir Brian praises his work.

More from Sir Brian Langstaff who continues to recap his report and says successive governments and the NHS compounded victims’ suffering.

“More than that, the government repeatedly maintained that people received the best available treatment and that testing of blood donations began as soon as the technology was available,” he says.

“And both claims were untrue.”

Langstaff insists the inquiry’s mission to prevent similar scandals is not only about “taking steps to meet any threat of a future infection carried by blood, blood products or tissue, but to ensure as far as we can that government responds to the citizens it serves, how shall I put this, more appropriately”.

Langstaff continues to speak, underlining that the inquiry is not just investigating something that has happened in the past but something that is still happening now.

He describes victims early on as being shunned or even abused “by neighbours, workmates, by people they had once thought of as friends. Sometimes by health professionals”.

“People still have to care for the after-effects of what happened which their loved ones still suffer. The grief and trauma which all of those who lost loved ones experienced continues to this day.”

He adds that early treatments for both HIV and Hepatitis C caused lingering side effects and “were often worse than the illnesses themselves”.

Of the victims, he says “every aspect of their lives” has been defined by the infections.

“This disaster was not an accident,” Sir Brian Langstaff has said to a round of applause.

“People put their faith in doctors and in the government to keep them safe and their trust was betrayed.”

He adds that there are generally two elements to a public inquiry – backward looking and considering why, and forward looking.

This inquiry, he says, has a third element – the response of the government and others in authority.

“Here the NHS and successive governments compounded the agony by refusing to accept that wrong had been done.

“The government repeatedly maintained that people received the best available treatment and that testing of blood donations began as soon as the technology was available.

“Both claims were untrue.”

There is a huge round of applause for the report’s author Sir Brian Langstaff as he gets up to speak in front of an auditorium in central London.

He says his full report was handed to the Cabinet Office at 07:00 as he says it is now his role to present it to the wider public.

Sir Brian says: “The wider public who have had no connection to this inquiry before. Seven volumes, there is quite a lot of detail in it.”

The number of those dying is climbing “week by week”, Sir Brian says.

He adds: “The harm that was done to people cannot adequately be put into words, I have tried.

“But parents watched their children suffer and, in many cases, die. “Children witnessed the decline and death of one, sometimes both, parents and their lives were irrevocably altered as a result.

“People had to care for their grievously ill partners or other family members, often at the expense of their own health and careers.”

Rajini Vaidynathan

Reporting from Methodist Central Hall in Westminster

Outside the inquiry family members clapped as the report was made public. Several stood outside the Methodist Central Hall in London, holding a banner with the faces of their beloved who died.

Today’s report might provide some relief after years of a search for answers, but it won’t bring back their relatives who died due to failures highlighted in today’s report. Their deaths, it said, could have been avoided.

Copyright: Getty Images

Scottish Public Health Minister Jenni Minto has apologised to the victims.

In a statement, Minto says: “On behalf of the Scottish government, I reiterate our sincere apology to those who have been infected or affected by NHS blood or blood products.

“The Scottish government has already accepted the moral case for compensation for infected blood victims and is committed to working with the UK government to ensure any compensation scheme works as well as possible for victims.”

She adds that the government has set up an oversight group, including senior staff from NHS boards and charities representing those affected, to “consider the inquiry’s recommendations for Scotland”.

The news conference has now wrapped up.

Before it ended, a reporter asked how the governments needed to work together to co-ordinate a response to the inquiry.

Joyce Donnelly said the Scottish government launched the Scottish Infected Blood Support Scheme, which is a “godsend” to victims of the scandal.

“Where we go from there with the devolved government, I would hesitate to guess,” she added.

The people who use the scheme “couldn’t get insurance, or a mortgage, this has given them something that needs to be sustained for their mental welfare as well has their physical welfare,” she said.

Nigel Hamilton then said a health committee in Northern Ireland wants to work in partnership with victims.

“We want to see the continuation of commitment to victims that Robin Swann has shown,” he added.

Lynne Kelly said that in Wales “we don’t know what the government will do with report recommendations on compensations and that will give us sleepless nights”.

Next Lynne Kelly is asked how she feels and if this is the moment for criminal charges.

She says she has had “limited viewing” of the report – having been on a coach for four hours.

“Now learning this could have been avoided when we were told it was unavoidable, that troubles people,” she adds.

Kelly says there are still unclear details about the compensation which she says is expected to be announced tomorrow.

The difficulty now is inquiry chairman’s Sir Brian Langstaff’s rules may be overruled by the government or ignored, Kelly adds.

Jackie Britton adds the government has a “duty of care towards us” saying “they’ve given us death sentences”.

Joyce Donnelly, representing the Scottish Infected Blood Forum, calls attention to the fact that recommendations made in Scotland made 20 years ago by Lord Ross were never carried through.

Now though, she hopes they will be “carried through to the letter”.

She says people are still waiting for things to be put right although some have already died.

Nigel Hamilton, Chairman of Haemophilia Northern Ireland, has lost family members including his twin as well as two friends.

He describes the production of the report as healing and supportive.

Hamilton says compensation will be paid but that it is neither an answer to problems, nor a solution.

For him, the report indicates successive governments are culpable of neglect and abandonment.

The Northern Ireland report suggests their government followed suit. NI government had two problems – security and lack of a consistent government, he adds.

He says a culture change, candour and transparency are required moving forward.

Jackie Britton, representing BloodLoss Families says “the knowledge was out there, but our government ignored it and couldn’t be bothered with it”.

Asked what the report means to her, she says “this blatantly in black and white says they had no excuses” not to address it earlier on.

We’re hearing more from another news conference – speaking are Jackie Britton from BloodLoss Families, Lynne Kelly from Haemophilia Wales, Nigel Hamilton from Haemophilia Northern Ireland, Joyce Donnelly from Scottish Infected Blood Forum and John Dearden from Haemophilia Scotland.

Kelly starts by saying it is a “very thorough” report and from her point of view her main concern from Wales is what the government will do with the recommendations.

She notes a lot of criticism within the report and says it appears Wales “mirrored” what was happening in the UK.

We’ll bring you more from this news conference here, or you can watch live by pressing Play at the top of this page.

This inquiry has also been asked to investigate how victims of this scandal and their families were treated in the decades after they were infected.

Again it highlights a series of failures by government and the health authorities including:

• The absence of any meaningful apology and redress
• The “repeated use” of inaccurate, misleading and defensive lines which “cruelly told people that they had received the best treatment available”
• A “lack of openness, transparency and candour” from the NHS and government
• Long delays in providing support payments and a refusal to provide compensation

It also criticises the decision by successive governments to reject calls for a public inquiry by producing “flawed, incomplete and unfair” internal reports.

Sir Brian Langstaff, the chair of the inquiry, said it will be “astonishing to anyone who reads this report that these events could have happened in the UK”.

The families affected had been subjected to “a level of suffering which is difficult to comprehend, still less understand,” he adds, which was “compounded by the reaction of the government, NHS and other public bodies”.

As we’ve been reporting, one of the campaigners has said that the finding in the report that there is evidence of a cover-up is “no surprise”.

Clive Smith, chairman of the Haemophilia Society, added that “we have known that for decades and now the country knows and now the world knows as well.”

He was speaking alongside other campaigners at a press conference a little earlier. You can watch his reaction to the report in the clip below.

In 1981, the first reports started to emerge about a new disease which would later become known as Aids.

By the end of 1982, the inquiry says, ”all those involved in treating patients with blood or blood products either knew, or should have known, of the risks.”

Throughout 1983, the warnings signs were growing louder.

In May 1983, one of the UK’s top infectious disease experts Dr Spence Galbraith, wrote to the Department of Health saying that all imported American blood products should be withdrawn from NHS use until the aids risk was “clarified”.

Yet that didn’t happen and the contaminated American products continued to be used.

The inquiry heavily criticises the decision not to suspend the importation of those products at the time and also for failing to keep the situation under review.

At the time government ministers were saying in parliament that there was still “no conclusive proof” that HIV could be transmitted in blood.

The inquiry says that was the “wrong approach” which was “falsely reassuring the public and patients”.

Instead politicians and officials should have been asking if “there was a real risk blood might transmit [HIV],” it says.

The public inquiry makes it clear we should not have waited so long to get this point. It has looked over more than 50 years of government decision-making, saying there has been an “institutional defensiveness” by the NHS and government which has compounded the harms that have been done.

Campaigners have always been critical of how long it has taken to get a public inquiry.

In other countries that faced contaminated blood scandals, including France and Japan, investigations into the medical disasters were completed many years ago.

In some cases, criminal charges were brought against doctors, politicians and other officials.

In the UK, a private inquiry in 2009 – funded entirely by donations – lacked any real powers, while a separate Scottish investigation in 2015 was branded a “whitewash” by victims and their families.

This public inquiry was only agreed to in 2017 by the then-Prime Minister Theresa May under political pressure.

Inquiry chair Sir Brian Langstaff said the delays getting to this point had meant it had been more difficult to get at the truth with key people involved having died or being too frail to give evidence. It also meant it was harder to get access to information and documents than it would have been in earlier years.

A reporter asked about the words used in the report to describe former health secretary Lord Clarke, among which was combative.

Clive Smith says he spent three days watching him give evidence and that he was “patronising in the extreme”.

He adds that Lord Clarke had clearly never met anyone with Haemophilia. For the Health Secretary not to sit down with that community is “appalling”, he says.

Jason Evans adds that Clarke asked whether Factor VIII was a pill. Jason says he used that to ask the media to assist with public understanding about the product.