BBCCopyright: BBCSunday Times political editor Caroline Wheeler has been covering the infected blood story for 20 years and says there is “a culture of cover-up at our institutions.”
“We became increasingly reliant on importing [blood] from the United States,” she tells BBC 5 Live. “In 1975, Granada’s World In Action programme revealed a lot of this blood was being sourced cheaply in a kind of “ooze for booze” programme, as it became known, from sex workers, drug addicts and prisons.”“The idea that you wouldn’t have known the risks at this time was for the birds.” She adds: “It wasn’t just the individual haematologists that were making decisions about treatment, it was the Whitehall mandarins that were not taking heed of those warnings, it was the ministers that then delivered or in this case failed to deliver the policy of self-sufficiency, and it was the prime ministers who ducked the issues and failed to give answers and to hold public inquiries in the years that followed.”
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“We became increasingly reliant on importing [blood] from the United States,” she tells BBC 5 Live. “In 1975, Granada’s World In Action programme revealed a lot of this blood was being sourced cheaply in a kind of “ooze for booze” programme, as it became known, from sex workers, drug addicts and prisons.”“The idea that you wouldn’t have known the risks at this time was for the birds.” She adds: “It wasn’t just the individual haematologists that were making decisions about treatment, it was the Whitehall mandarins that were not taking heed of those warnings, it was the ministers that then delivered or in this case failed to deliver the policy of self-sufficiency, and it was the prime ministers who ducked the issues and failed to give answers and to hold public inquiries in the years that followed.”nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]