HUNDREDS of orphans, mentally handicapped children and children in care were used in secret experiments to test vaccines in the 1950s and 1960s.
Local health authorities in this country and the Irish Republic allegedly used large numbers of children in homes and orphanages in trials of unproven medicines.
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The claim, made in a BBC Radio 4 documentary being broadcast tonight, asserts that the trials — which in some cases caused convulsions or brain damage — were often administered without parental consent and that many records of the trials have since disappeared.
The claims are backed by Gordon Stewart, now Emeritus Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow, who was part of a government-appointed investigative team in 1974 that looked at the sideeffects of the trial injections.
Although the results of some of the trials were subsequently published in the British Medical Journal in the 1960s, many of the details of the test vaccinations, as well as subsequent mass vaccination of children against whooping cough, have vanished. Campaigners allege that there are 1,200 known cases of children who were brain-damaged by the whooping cough vaccine, which is now banned.
Professor Stewart said: “The local authorities were in charge of the policies and some of them decided that chidren in special homes or institutions should receive them (the untested vaccinations). There were thousands of children put into two groups (a placebo and the trial vaccination) for any one of the vaccines. In ethical terms it would be considered very questionable nowadays. The main thing was that a placebo group were receiving a vaccine which had never been approved for general use and contained a mixture of bacteria which were very uncertain.
“There is no doubt that brain damage occurred. The severe reactions included convulsions and mental defects. Some of the children would scream for two to three days after their injections. Some were comatose and now, at the age of 40 or 50, brutally defective.”
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He added: “The details of all those cases were collated by the Medical Research Council and sent to the Department of Health and they managed to lose them, especially the bit about adverse reactions. It is true that at that time the records of a lot of children, some of which were most certainly brain-damaged, disappeared.”
In Ireland, where similar tests were conducted and files are still in existence, the Government has ordered an inquiry into claims that children in homes were involuntarily experimented on with test vaccines for rubella, whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus.
It is not known whether the drugs, manufactured by Glaxo (now GlaxoSmithKline) among others, induced long-term harmful effects. The drug companies were not involved in the testing. The alleged Irish victims are claiming that they were abused.
Josephine Bassett gave birth to a daughter, Marie, in the Sacred Heart Convent, near Cork, in the 1950s. She claims that before Marie was adopted, injections were given to the child without her consent.
“They never asked mothers for their permission for anything,” she said.
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“You had to hold the babies down when they were given their injections. She (Marie) was vomiting after she’d had her injections.”
A spokeswoman for Sacred Heart denied that parental permission was not sought.
Olivia Price, of the Vaccine Victims Support Group, said: “There were children who were vaccinated without their parents consent. They would have used these vaccines because they didn’t need parental consent. Their rights were taken away because there was nobody there to say no.”
A spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline in Ireland said: “The report and records show that none of the children in the trials suffered any serious adverse events due to the vaccinations.”
The Medical Research Council said: “We haven’t yet heard the full extent of Professor Stewart’s evidence for his claims and, given the time that has elapsed, we’d have to take time to check our archives to see if MRC was conducting such vaccine research at that time and in what circumstances.”
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Guinea Pig Kids is broadcast tonight on Radio 4 at 8pm.