UK Set to Spend $12.7bn on Compensation in Country’s Infected Blood Scandal

*Report for release today, Sunak to make official apology to victims’ families

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

Britain will spend more than £10 billion or $12.7 billion compensating thousands of people who were treated with blood contaminated with HIV or hepatitis C in the 1970s and 1980s,  Reuters quoted the Sunday Times as reporting yesterday.
The infected blood scandal is widely seen as one of the worst treatment disasters in the history of the state-funded National Health Service.

An estimated 30,000 people were given contaminated blood, with about 3,000 of those believed to have died. Many more lives have been affected by disease and some of those infected have never been traced.
Victims and their families are still calling for justice, compensation and answers over how it was allowed to happen despite warnings over the risks.
The blood and blood products, some of which were imported from the United States, were administered to people needing transfusions or as treatment for haemophilia.

Ahead of the publication of an independent inquiry report on Monday, the Sunday Times said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak would make an official apology. The government would then announce a compensation package financed by borrowing as early as Tuesday (tomorrow).
“I think this is the worst scandal of my lifetime,” Finance Minister, Jeremy Hunt, told the paper.
“I think that the families have got every right to be incredibly angry that generations of politicians, including me when I was health secretary, have not acted fast enough to address the scandal,” he added.

He did not confirm the cost or funding arrangements of the compensation scheme.
Former prime minister David Cameron in 2015 apologised for the scandal following a report into its impact in Scotland. In 2017, under prime minister Theresa May, the government announced the public inquiry.
The inquiry will publish its findings on Monday (today) having considered questions including whether the contaminated treatments should have been stopped sooner and whether there were attempts to cover up the problem.
The government has already paid 100,000 pounds of interim compensation to some victims at an estimated cost of around 400 million pounds following a recommendation from the inquiry in 2022.

In April this year, it was reported that commercial blood product at the centre of the biggest treatment scandal in the history of the National Health Service (NHS) was approved for use after government officials were told convicts were among the paid donors and virus contamination “should be assumed.”
The product, given to ­haemophiliacs to enable their blood to clot, was injected into thousands of patients in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, ­including young children, who were infected with the diseases.

A single batch could contain plasma from 20,000 donors harvested in US prisons and some of the poorest neighbourhoods of America, where drug use and sexual infections were rife. One infected donation would contaminate the entire batch, a report quoted by THISDAY said.
The inquiry headed by Sir Brian Langstaff is expected to make a submission on the scandal, which has killed about 3,000 people. He had already concluded “wrongs were done at individual, collective and systemic levels”.

The drug firm, Bayer, provided 7,000 documents to the inquiry, which revealed its subsidiary, Cutter Laboratories, warned in licensing application documents in the 1970s that its commercial blood product Koate, may ­contain viruses.
The product, known as a factor VIII concentrate, was approved in August 1976 along with similar treatments that were a conduit for deadly viruses for several years.
Des Collins, of Collins Solicitors, acting for 1,500 infected or affected people, said the licensing documents were “shocking” and products should not have been approved until viral inactivation was available. “There was a huge failure by ministers and successive administrations,” he had said.
Stuart Cantrill, 50, whose father Barrie died in 1989 from an Aids-related illness after contracting HIV from a commercial blood product for haemophilia, said: “There were clearly some in the NHS and in government who were aware of the risks and chose to ignore them. They went ahead and used a product which was almost ­certain to infect everyone.”
Experts in the 1970s considered the risk of a patient contracting hepatitis B from the pooled products was outweighed by the benefits of treatment, but did not consider the presence of more deadly viruses which had not then been identified, specifically hepatitis C and HIV.
When the cases of Aids were first reported in the 1980s, officials and ministers failed to act over the risk of the disease being spread by the contaminated blood. The Observer flagged the risk in January 1983, warning: “A commercial blood product imported into Britain from the United States may pose a grave threat to the health of haemophiliacs.”
Four months later, the Mail on Sunday warned of hospitals using killer blood. It warned the pooled blood products from the US might be infected with HIV and “threatening the lives of thousands of British people”.
It was an accurate and prescient warning, but the government said there was no conclusive proof and failed to withdraw the contaminated product, which then infected adult and child patients with HIV.
The dirty blood was administered for another two years before heat treatment was introduced in 1985.