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Orphans 'Were Used In Trials Of Vaccines' (UK / Ireland)

ramonmercado

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Orphans 'were used in trials of vaccines'
By Stefanie Marsh

HUNDREDS of orphans, mentally handicapped children and children in care were used in secret experiments to test vaccines in the 1950s and 1960s.

Local health authorities in this country and the Irish Republic allegedly used large numbers of children in homes and orphanages in trials of unproven medicines.

The claim, made in a BBC Radio 4 documentary being broadcast tonight, asserts that the trials — which in some cases caused convulsions or brain damage — were often administered without parental consent and that many records of the trials have since disappeared.

The claims are backed by Gordon Stewart, now Emeritus Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow, who was part of a government-appointed investigative team in 1974 that looked at the sideeffects of the trial injections.

Although the results of some of the trials were subsequently published in the British Medical Journal in the 1960s, many of the details of the test vaccinations, as well as subsequent mass vaccination of children against whooping cough, have vanished. Campaigners allege that there are 1,200 known cases of children who were brain-damaged by the whooping cough vaccine, which is now banned.

Professor Stewart said: “The local authorities were in charge of the policies and some of them decided that chidren in special homes or institutions should receive them (the untested vaccinations). There were thousands of children put into two groups (a placebo and the trial vaccination) for any one of the vaccines. In ethical terms it would be considered very questionable nowadays. The main thing was that a placebo group were receiving a vaccine which had never been approved for general use and contained a mixture of bacteria which were very uncertain.

“There is no doubt that brain damage occurred. The severe reactions included convulsions and mental defects. Some of the children would scream for two to three days after their injections. Some were comatose and now, at the age of 40 or 50, brutally defective.”

He added: “The details of all those cases were collated by the Medical Research Council and sent to the Department of Health and they managed to lose them, especially the bit about adverse reactions. It is true that at that time the records of a lot of children, some of which were most certainly brain-damaged, disappeared.”

In Ireland, where similar tests were conducted and files are still in existence, the Government has ordered an inquiry into claims that children in homes were involuntarily experimented on with test vaccines for rubella, whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus.
It is not known whether the drugs, manufactured by Glaxo (now GlaxoSmithKline) among others, induced long-term harmful effects. The drug companies were not involved in the testing. The alleged Irish victims are claiming that they were abused.



Josephine Bassett gave birth to a daughter, Marie, in the Sacred Heart Convent, near Cork, in the 1950s. She claims that before Marie was adopted, injections were given to the child without her consent.

“They never asked mothers for their permission for anything,” she said.

“You had to hold the babies down when they were given their injections. She (Marie) was vomiting after she’d had her injections.”

A spokeswoman for Sacred Heart denied that parental permission was not sought.

Olivia Price, of the Vaccine Victims Support Group, said: “There were children who were vaccinated without their parents consent. They would have used these vaccines because they didn’t need parental consent. Their rights were taken away because there was nobody there to say no.”

A spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline in Ireland said: “The report and records show that none of the children in the trials suffered any serious adverse events due to the vaccinations.”

The Medical Research Council said: “We haven’t yet heard the full extent of Professor Stewart’s evidence for his claims and, given the time that has elapsed, we’d have to take time to check our archives to see if MRC was conducting such vaccine research at that time and in what circumstances.”

Guinea Pig Kids is broadcast tonight on Radio 4 at 8pm.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-1238658,00.html
 
That's horrible! I wonder if they ever still do that at all.:confused:
 
RainyOcean said:
That's horrible! I wonder if they ever still do that at all.:confused:
I heard that program. It went on to detail how they still did it today, giving babies with AIDS in the US experimental drugs without full parental consent, as well as using 3rd world kids as guinea pigs for general drug testing.
 
Lots of old people and children are given experimental drugs all the time, and don't realise they are participating in an experiment.
A lot of (dodgy) GPs collaborate with pharmaceutical companies in this.
I'm not saying it's common, mind.
I think drug companies may do this because of a lack of research volunteers.
 
Prosecutions are required in these cases. Many of the doctors, nurses and other medical staff involved will still be alive, some may still be working in the NHS or for other hospitals/institutes.

The true scale of the number of medical trials using infected blood products on children in the 1970s and 80s has been revealed by documents seen by BBC News.

They reveal a secret world of unsafe clinical testing involving children in the UK, as doctors placed research goals ahead of patients' needs. They continued for more than 15 years, involved hundreds of people, and infected most with hepatitis C and HIV.

One surviving patient told the BBC he was treated like a "guinea pig".

The trials involved children with blood clotting disorders, when families had often not consented to them taking part. The majority of the children who enrolled are now dead.

Documents also show that doctors in haemophilia centres across the country used blood products, even though they were widely known as likely to be contaminated.

A shortage of blood products in the UK in the 1970s and 80s meant they were imported from the US. High-risk donors such as prisoners and drug addicts provided the plasma for the treatments that were infected with potentially fatal viruses including hepatitis C - which attacks the liver resulting in cirrhosis and cancer - and HIV.

One blood product, known as Factor VIII, was seen to be highly effective for stopping bleeding but also widely known to be contaminated with viruses.

A public inquiry is under way into the scandal. The final report is due in May. ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68831061
 
Prosecutions are required in these cases. Many of the doctors, nurses and other medical staff involved will still be alive, some may still be working in the NHS or for other hospitals/institutes.

The true scale of the number of medical trials using infected blood products on children in the 1970s and 80s has been revealed by documents seen by BBC News.

They reveal a secret world of unsafe clinical testing involving children in the UK, as doctors placed research goals ahead of patients' needs. They continued for more than 15 years, involved hundreds of people, and infected most with hepatitis C and HIV.

One surviving patient told the BBC he was treated like a "guinea pig".

The trials involved children with blood clotting disorders, when families had often not consented to them taking part. The majority of the children who enrolled are now dead.

Documents also show that doctors in haemophilia centres across the country used blood products, even though they were widely known as likely to be contaminated.

A shortage of blood products in the UK in the 1970s and 80s meant they were imported from the US. High-risk donors such as prisoners and drug addicts provided the plasma for the treatments that were infected with potentially fatal viruses including hepatitis C - which attacks the liver resulting in cirrhosis and cancer - and HIV.

One blood product, known as Factor VIII, was seen to be highly effective for stopping bleeding but also widely known to be contaminated with viruses.

A public inquiry is under way into the scandal. The final report is due in May. ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68831061

More on this scandal.

"I received a phone call from one of the doctors telling me [my son] Martin was in the sick bay where he had been for three weeks.

"This was the first time they were telling me because they were worried he might actually pass away."

Martin Wells was born in Podsmead, Gloucestershire, in 1968 with "a bruise on the top of his head [which doctors] said was normal," Chris Woodridge said.

He was diagnosed with haemophilia, a bleeding disorder, at 18 months old.

He later contracted HIV, as part of the infected blood scandal, which saw more than 30,000 people infected with diseases from contaminated blood products during the 1970s and 1980s.


"He used to bruise from rolling over, side to side... so I took him to the doctor and she told me she was sure it was haemophilia and nothing could be done for him," Ms Woodridge said.

"He was around eight months old then."

Family handout Chris Woodridge with son Martin Wells as a toddler
Family handout
Chris Woodridge said she was told "nothing could be done" to treat her son's haemophilia when he was less than a year old

His sister, Stella Wells, said when it came to school, he initially went to a mainstream setting but they struggled to support him with his medication.

He was then sent to Lord Mayor's Treloar's College, a boarding school for children with disabilities, which had a specialist NHS haemophilia centre on site run by a dedicated medical team.


Haemophilia is a disorder that prevents blood from clotting properly and can lead to spontaneous bleeding.

'Contracted HIV'​

Ms Wells said her brother "grew independence in managing his medication and met other people the same".

"He had a lot of peers with haemophilia and that was where he contracted HIV [after receiving infected Factor VIII blood] in 1983."

The family was left trying to pick up the pieces and his mother Chris Woodridge had a break down.

She said as soon as she saw her son in the sick bay, she "knew what it was". ...

From 1974 to 1987, children - like Martin Wells - were offered treatment for haemophilia at Treloar's College.

At least 72 of those pupils died after being infected with HIV and viral hepatitis when they were treated with infected blood products.

They were unwittingly caught up in what has been called the worst treatment disaster in NHS history, in which patients were treated with contaminated blood that was untested. ...

A public inquiry into the infected blood scandal, thought to be responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, will publish its findings on 20 May.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-68884338
 
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