More than 500 victims of the worst treatment tragedy in NHS history have perished during the long-awaited infected blood inquiry.
A newspaper outlet exposed the damning figure as the five-year investigation, the most extensive inquiry in UK history finally ends next week.
The inquiry will sit for the last time next Friday before chairman Sir Brian Langstaff retires to consider the mountain of evidence, but it’s come too late for those who’ve perished without seeing justice.
According to the Haemophilia Society, more than 500 of those infected in the scandal have perished since the investigation was reported in 2017. With victims dying at a rate of one every four days, it’s feared many more will be gone before the inquiry’s recommendations are enforced and full compensation given.
Society chief executive Kate Burt urged the Government to face up to past mistakes by acting quickly on the inquiry’s conclusions, which are expected to be published next year. She said that time was not on their community’s side.
Thousands were contaminated with HIV and hepatitis C through infected blood in the 1970s and 1980s amid claims of a cover-up. Among those to have perished during the investigation was campaigner Peter Mossman.
Peter Mossman died aged 78 after developing pneumonia and was buried at 3 pm on February 3, 2022. Sir Brian is expected to give his closing remarks at 3 pm on February 3.
Peter Mossman’s son Gareth said that his father was consumed by his need to get justice and fought for this inquiry for so long.
He said it made him emotional to think that the inquiry was coming to an end on the anniversary of his funeral and that it was massively upsetting that he wasn’t there to see it.
People with haemophilia were mostly contaminated via a plasma-derived product known as factor VIII, a processed pharmaceutical product sourced from the United States and elsewhere.
Did this mean that the Americans had the same problem and did it make people sick, or did they keep all the clean blood for themselves?
This was a standard legal malpractice, but they kept dragging it in and out of court as long as possible in the hope that the complainants either ran out of money, will or life or preferably all three so that the defendant wins by default. This should have been sorted out decades ago! And people are dying waiting for organ transplants while the blood/organ donor service refuses to accept solutions to this situation because they chose to rely on altruism.
And even though this story is now making the news, it’s truly not gotten the kind of coverage it should have done, but of course, killing off patients saves money, and there certainly doesn’t appear to be enough outrage about this.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 