Minister says vaccination trial report is incomplete

The report of the Chief Medical Officer on three vaccination trials on children in institutional care in the 1960s and 1970s is incomplete, according to the Minister for Health.

Mr Martin told the Dail: "It raises as many questions as it answers, and some of those questions go to the heart of our attitudes to children and their rights". The issue was to establish if the State fulfilled its obligations to children in the care of the State, and the question of consent could not be fudged because it was fundamental.

He did not know whether the rights of those children in the trials were protected, but it was important "to move heaven and earth to find out". The trials were on children in homes in Dublin, Cork and the midlands.

Mr Martin insisted that referring the report to the Laffoy Commission on Child Abuse was the right approach, because it offered "an unrivalled capacity for ruthless thoroughness and appropriate speed". The Laffoy commission was "the ultimate guarantor against a cover-up or a whitewash of any kind".

Fine Gael's health spokesman, Mr Gay Mitchell, said the Department and Minister were too eager to refer the report to the commission "where it will be lost among even more serious allegations and may not be reached for some years".

However, Labour's health spokeswoman, Ms Liz McManus, backed the Minister's plan to refer the report to the commission, and accused Mr Mitchell of showing a lack of respect to those who were used in the trials, by saying they were "duped" by the Minister into agreeing that the report should be referred to the commission.

Outlining the trials, the Minister said the first was published in 1962 and looked at what would happen if four vaccines - for diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and polio - were combined in one.

The second, published 10 years later, was to find out if German measles vaccine, administered through the nose, could spread to susceptible contacts. The third trial, in 1973, was not published but compared the capacity of a commercially available tetanus vaccine and a modified one to produce adverse reactions.

Mr Martin said: "We have no evidence that any child contracted a serious illness as a result of the trials."

He told the Dail during a special debate that the report was incomplete because in some areas "the most rigorous interrogation of the system failed to produce documentary records of the trials. In some cases the consultant who conducted the trials believed they took place in particular homes, but the homes don't have files that substantiate this."

He stressed, however, that the State did not have the right to view children in care as lesser citizens. Mr Mitchell said it was "very clear that the medical ethic of the day, which should have been known to researchers stressed mostly strongly the need for consent. There is no evidence that consent was given though a researcher claims it was."

Ms McManus said it was important "that fairness prevails in the work of the commission and that the danger of hindsight distorting the truth surrounding these clinical vaccine trials be averted".

The children in the vaccine trials were treated abominably and as guinea pigs, said Ms Marian McGennis (FF, Dublin Central) and there was no doubt that they were treated differently from other children. She said she was also convinced that the co-operation needed to see the issue through would not be forthcoming from agencies involved in the vaccinations.

Mr Paul Bradford (FG, Cork East) said the children in the trials were treated almost like "children of a lesser God". He said that if the report was going to the commission, the least the Minister could do was to ensure it would be dealt with quickly and not go to the bottom of the pile because the commission had a lot of work to do. Mr John Gormley (Green) said it had been said that the medical establishment was guilty of arrogance but what they did was not illegal. "I don't accept that. It is not a question of whether it was legal or illegal. It is a question of whether it was right or whether it was justified or whether it was ethical.

"We need to look very closely at the motives and whether the so-called advancement of medical science coincided with monetary gain, because the link between the pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment is a little too cosy for comfort, and they brook no criticism."