Collateral damage
INFECTED BLOOD SCANDAL: LIVING HELL OF VICTIMS Unscrupulous doctors behaved without any ethics, say sufferers
DOCTORS acted like gods and classed children as collateral damage, a victim of the infected blood scandal says.
Andy Evans, who was infected with HIV and hepatitis C when he was five, added yesterday’s report has backed up everything the victims and their families have been saying for 40 years.
He said it had been clear since 1986 that a public inquiry needed to be set up to investigate why they were exposed to deadly conditions.
Mr Evans, 47, co-founder and chairman of campaign group Tainted Blood, said: “This was foisted on us by unscrupulous doctors, unscrupulous licensing authorities.
“It was exacerbated by the godlike attitude of doctors who thought they could make decisions on behalf of parents, and the children were just collateral damage.
“They were there to be experimented on and have their infections monitored without telling them. Adults [were allowed] to go away without knowledge of their diagnoses so that they could infect their partners.”
He said doctors then denied they had done anything wrong.
Mr Evans added: “There were times during the campaign that we felt so down and disheartened that we could never see an end to it.”
Glenn Wilkinson, who co-founded the Contaminated Blood Campaign, said warnings had been continually ignored, meaning thousands like him were infected.
Mr Wilkinson was infected with hepatitis C during dental surgery in 1983, when he was unnecessarily given Factor 8 products. He said: “I know from the group I run that there’s a very deep feeling that consequences should be brought to bear on individuals from the medical profession, from the politicians and the pharmaceutical companies.”
Mr Wilkinson wants the businesses to help pay the compensation bill. He said: “They bear a lot of the responsibility.
“Regarding the financial costs, they should be made to suffer some of that because it was their poison basically that they put into our veins that caused this problem.” He added: “We didn’t have to go through all this. People didn’t have to die in the thousands.” Mr Wilkinson said: “The warnings were not heeded, they carried on infecting people... They were warned time and time again. They didn’t stop – so people like me were infected with this filth. “We’ve lost friends and colleagues and campaign members and family members. You just think ‘all those people should be with us today’. “I think we’ve lost about 700 people just in the time it’s taken this campaign to develop.” Alicia Samuels, whose dad, the Rev Clifford Samuels, died in 2019 after being unaware he had hepatitis C for decades, wants the Government to take responsibility” for the scandal. Her father is believed to have contracted the virus during an operation to remove a stomach ulcer in the 1970s.
He later developed liver cancer and passed away aged 75. Ms Samuels said: “On the day my father died, he told me ‘please don’t give up fighting for justice’.
“The compensation will never bring back my dad, and that is all I want. But we know the Government has the money and they should cough up and take responsibility.” david.burke@mirror.co.uk