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LONDON — The British government finally apologized Monday for one of the country’s worst-ever healthcare disasters.
After years of campaigning by victims, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said sorry on behalf of the U.K. state for the infected blood scandal, a decades-long failure “at the heart of our national life” that should “shake our nation to its core.”
Thousands of people in the U.K. died after being treated with unsafe blood products between 1970 and 1991. Many more fell ill, with more than 30,000 people infected with HIV or hepatitis C.
A long-running public inquiry concluded Monday that the disaster could have been largely avoided. It offered up an excoriating report that blasted the health service, Whitehall officials, and successive ministers for refusing to acknowledge their mistakes or address them.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is poised to approve a multi-billion pound package to compensate those swept up in the scandal — dubbed the worst in the history of Britain’s National Health Service — on Tuesday.
And Sunak promised: “Whatever it costs to deliver this scheme we will pay it.”
In a somber House of Commons statement Monday, the prime minister said: “Today I want to speak directly to the victims and their families … I want to make a wholehearted and unequivocal apology for this terrible injustice.”
Opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer said his own party — in government through the late 1990s and first decade of the 2000s — accepted its share of the blame and vowed to work with the government to get compensation out of the door. And he lamented “one of the gravest injustices” in British history.
‘Lack of candor’
The leaders’ statements come after the final report of the damning official inquiry found that the scandal was no accident — and blamed a catalogue of failures by the health service and governments of varying political colors.
Thousands of patients — many who had hemophilia, an inherited blood clotting disorder — were treated by the NHS during the 1970s and 1980s with blood products later found to have been contaminated with HIV and hepatitis.
Up to 2,900 people, including young children, are estimated to have died by 2019, with many more becoming severely ill. Those affected were undergoing regular medical treatment and had no reason to think they were in danger.
The report argued that patients were knowingly exposed to “unacceptable” infection risks, and that many were then not told if they had been infected following blood transfusions.
It also took aim at successive governments and the health service for a “lack of candor,” and accused British officialdom of a cover-up in response to the infections.
“Sometimes the truth was hidden by a treating clinician,” the report said. “Sometimes it was hidden by an organization. Sometimes it was hidden by the civil service. Sometimes it was hidden by (and sometimes from) politicians.”
“This disaster was not an accident,” the inquiry’s Chair, Brian Langstaff, said as he launched the report at an emotionally-charged event in London’s Westminster, the heart of British power.
“The infections happened because those in authority — doctors, the blood services and successive governments — did not put patient safety first,” he said. Langstaff was given a standing ovation by an audience of victims and their families as the report was unveiled Monday.
Langstaff’s report particularly criticized the veteran Conservative politician Ken Clarke, who served as health secretary in the 1980’s government led by Margaret Thatcher.
Clarke insisted in 1983 — and then in subsequent years — that there was “no conclusive proof” that HIV could be spread through blood, despite the Department for Health at the time believing it was likely that it could be transmitted through blood and blood products.
Langstaff accused current ministers too of working at a “sluggish pace” on compensation for victims. In a separate Westminster press conference, earlier, Andy Evans of the Tainted Blood campaign group said victims had been “gaslit for generations.”
“This report today brings an end to that,” Evans said. “It looks to the future as well and says this cannot continue, this ethos of denial and cover up.”
‘Worst scandal in NHS history’
One key aspect of the scandal was the use of factor concentrate — known as Factor VIII — to treat hemophiliacs.
The then-revolutionary treatment was created by pooling blood plasma from thousands of donors and concentrating it to extract the clotting agent. This could then be used at home and meant patients were able to treat themselves before they had a potentially fatal bleed.
But while extracting factor concentrate was seen as a huge step forward in terms of treatment, just one contaminated sample could infect an entire batch — and the inquiry found that health leaders and the government failed to take the risks into account, leading to calamity.
“For decades this was not accepted by the government,” Diana Johnson, a Labour MP and chair of the Commons home affairs committee, told POLITICO Monday. “There was a cover-up for 40 years.”
After two interim reports from Langstaff were published in 2022 and 2023, the government made interim compensation payments to around 4,000 survivors and bereaved partners.
But many more who were affected did not receive these payments, and all eyes are now on the government as it prepares to set out its further package of compensation payments Tuesday.
Dan Bloom contributed reporting.
