The Contaminated Blood Inquiry. Is the focus of the media response misplaced!

We do not learn from our mistakes. History should teach us that scandals, disasters and fiascos are never recognised at the time, or even soon afterwards, but usually take 30-40, or even 50 years after they happen before they are accepted. We don't seem to understand this, even today, following the publication of the Infected Blood inquiry's final report. This is how the Guardian described the contaminated blood scandal.

            "The scandal has been described as the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS. People treated by the NHS in the UK between the 1970s and 1990s were exposed to tainted blood through transfusions, including during complications in childbirth, or, in the case of haemophiliacs, given contaminated “factor VIII” blood products imported from the US".

I wrote about this scandal here in 2017, in "The Contaminated Blood Scandal. The worst cover-up in NHS history". It certainly has been a cover-up of massive proportions, one that has lasted for over 50 years after the issues were first known.

And now, hiding (as yet unannounced and unrecognised) in the background, is yet another scandal in the making - the Covid-19 vaccine scandal. This has concerned a mass vaccination campaign using a largely untested, and therefore experimental vaccines). And I predict that this scandal might also take another 30, 40 or 50 years before it is fully recognised by the UK's health and political establishments.

This 30+ year gap from 'event' to 'recognition/apology' is not restricted to conventional medicine. The Hillsborough tragedy, the Bloody Sunday massacre, and the Post Office scandal, are all demonstration of this laggardly timescale; and but there are many others. Nor will these scandals be the last; there will no doubt be many others to come!

Yet it is within the confines of the conventional medical establishment that most of these scandals happen. I wrote about several of these medical scandals in Chapter 9, "Medical Errors" in my "The Failure of Conventional Medicine" e-book. And if we are ever going to learn, it is important to understand what is going on, and why these decades-long time-delays are allowed to happen - time and time again.

There are influential people and powerful organisations implicated in each and every one of these scandals. They invariably, inevitably hold control the information about the situation within their sphere; within industry, within the conventional medical establishment, within government, and/or within the mainstream media. They are people with reputations to defend, and personal wealth to protect. And corporations or institutions with profitability at stake. When it is realised that there is a problem, they defend themselves, vigorously, through many tried and tested strategies:

• initially they ignore the situation (on the basis that it is best not to discuss the situation in case it attracts unnecessary or unwanted publicity),
• then they obfuscate (it is best that people are confused, or over-whelmed, rather than certain that something 'bad' has happened),
  
• they go into denial, they cover-up (they play for time, defending themselves with arguments like "there is no evidence", or the "correlation is not causality", et al,
  
• they discount the importance of the situation (there may be a slight problem, but only a few people people were 'involved; it's not a serious issue), and they excuse themselves by saying that the benefits of what happened far outweighed the risks.
  

These factors were all in evidence in previous scandals; Thalidomide, Vioxx, Opioid, Primodos, Sodium Valproate, were all defended using these strategies. The infected blood scandal was no different, just the latest example of a medical scandal that took decades before the truth was recognised, and the cover-up revealed.

I suggest that the Covid-19 vaccine scandal is at the very earliest stage of this process. Literally millions of people, around the world, have reported serious adverse vaccine reactions to national drug regulators, and they have not been recognised, investigated or acted upon. There is growing realisation by doctors and others within the Conventional Medical Establishment that there is a serious problem (stemming from the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration), and when the patient harm issues have been raised in Parliament, by a handful of MP's, they have spoken to an almost empty chamber, and received only an obfuscatory response from a government minister. The voluminous reports of serious patient harm from the Covid-19 vaccines are said to be greater than any other vaccine for the last 70 years. There have been 'excess deaths' each and every month for the last 3 years (since the vaccine roll-out), and questions about  links with the Covid-19 vaccines have usually been ignored, or denied. All these suggestions and allegations meet with institutional ridicule and denial, a refusal to investigate further, and the determination to continue with the Covid vaccination campaign.

Any similarities here with the contaminated blood scandal in the 1970's and 1980's? An industry not prepared to abandon a profitable vaccine? A health system unwilling to admit that it has caused serious patient harm? A government that does not want to compensate and pay damages to damaged patients?

The problem is that we might have to wait 30 years to find out! We are in the early stages during which the victims do not receive recognition, sympathy, support or compensation. They are the 'ordinary' people, with limited resources; they are not 'experts', and they find it difficult to penetrate 'the system' which insists there is no problem; and they certainly don't have the funds to take the issue to a court of law. 

On the other side of the fence they face people in positions of great power and influence, backed by powerful institutions. These are rich and powerful people, in extremis, who stick together. They present as a united front to protect themselves, to sing from the same song sheet. Corporate directors, senior government officials, and the mainstream media control the agenda, the information is (and is not) made available to the public.

Indeed, with health scandals in particular, one notable feature of these scandals is that no action is taken to correct the fault. The infected blood products continue to be sold; the opioid drugs are still marketed; Sodium Valproate continues to be prescribed; and even the infamous Thalidomide drug is still being used, today! These sales continue until such time that the scandal becomes bigger, when sales begin to fall, or the hitherto toothless, incompetent drug regulator bans it; or the drug company 'withdraws' it because it has become "uncommercial". One of the Covid-19 vaccines, the AstraZeneca vaccine, has suffered this fate - withdrawn for 'commercial reason' even though  it was never approved in some countries (the USA), was banned in about 12 European countries, and 'withdrawn' from the UK. The 'commercial' reason was that no-one wanted the vaccine because of 'suspicions' that they caused serious patient harm!

Another common thread that runs through most, if not all, these medical scandals is that drug/vaccine/treatment involved usually started life as a "wonder drug", a "game changer" that would transform the treatment of one disease or another. However, each one has moved from being loudly heralded "a miracle cure" to be quietly being dropped as a killer drug.

And then we are led to believe that such a thing has never happened before! 

Even at the very end of medical scandals, as with the 'contaminated blood scandal', the issue is usually discounted as being a 'one-off' issue, a single, isolated and terrible medical 'mistake' that must not be allowed to happen again. Also, they are presented as situations that would not be allowed to happen, not now, because things have changed, medicine has moved on. So, the defective, disease-inducing blood scandal product becomes "the worse disaster in the history of the NHS" - the implication being that something as bad as this has never happened before. And of course the Inquiry will insure that no such thing will never happen again in future!

So usually no-one is ever held to account for the scandal. This is the main purpose of the long drawn out history of obstruction and delay. If resolution can be delayed for 30, 40, or 50 years on, the people involved will either be dead, or too old; their scandal-driven profits already spent, or no longer available. The pharmaceutical industry will have re-organised, the old, often defunct drug companies will no longer be around to question, or prosecute. The politicians and civil servants involved with the scandal will have moved on, or died. Even some of the documentation might have been 'lost'. 

So it is the current government (that is, tax payers) who foots the compensation/damages bill, especially when drug companies have been given immunity from prosecution.

Conventional medicine is inherently secretive. This is because it relies heavily on pharmaceutical drug treatments, all of which are known to have serious side effects that can cause serious patient harm. This is at the heart of what makes the NHS defensive in all its dealing with the public. This is why conventional medicine does not, perhaps cannot, function openly, transparently, or honestly.

So there will be more health scandals, and with all the evidence available at this point it seems safe to predict that the Covid-19 vaccines, which are already suspected to have caused so much serious patient harm (heart conditions, cancer, damage to the immune system, to mental health, et al), will eventually grab our attention. But not, perhaps, for another 30 or 40 years!

So how can we identify a scandal 30 to 40 years earlier? I have a couple of tips.

• Watch for a new 'medical breakthrough', the promotion of a new 'ground beating' medical treatment by both government, and the mainstream media,
  
• Listen to who is speaking, and what they are saying. (i) the voice of the 'common' people who claim they have been harmed, but who remain largely unheard, or beaten back, and (ii) the denials and obfuscations of the medical and political establishments.

If these conditions apply then we just might have another medical scandal to witness - if we live long enough to see it unravel!

 

Note: When it was first published, Blogger removed this post. It was part of the Media's censorship campaign again the idea that pharmaceutical medicine was anything but "safe and effective". It has since been republished!