THE funeral cortege of a 22 year old Dublin man who suffered brain damage after being vaccinated as a baby will stop outside the Department of Health this morning, where his parents will hand in a letter of protest addressed to the Minister, Mr Noonan.
Mr Kevin Duffy and Mrs Vera Duffy of Clontarf say that they have been involved in litigation for 20 years with the Eastern Health Board, the Wellcome Foundation drug company and a number of doctors arising out of the adverse reaction of their son, Alan, to whooping cough vaccine, administered when he was nine months old.
They said yesterday that, from the time of his birth in May 1973 until he received the vaccine, Alan was a normal, healthy baby, and they had the medical records to prove it. However, the "three in one" vaccination caused him brain damage which left him in the vegetative state he had remained in until his death, they alleged.
Since then, the Duffys who own the Bag Shop chain in Dublin and Cork have been involved in litigation. But the legal case "died with Alan on Sunday", Mr Duffy said yesterday.
Mrs Duffy founded the Irish Association for Vaccine Damaged Children in the mid 1970s to campaign for the rights of children like her son.
Last night she said "What we want now is an immediate apology from the Department of Health. They acted atrociously by fighting us for years and refusing to take responsibility for what happened.
"When we bring Alan to the Department of Health tomorrow, we will hand in a letter of protest asking that they apologise and acknowledge our long struggle.
"We don't want to appear anti vaccine or anti immunisation, because in their own way they are necessary. What we're trying to say is that when accidents like this happen they've got to knowledge it and take the proper steps to ensure that other families don't have to go through what we went through."
If his death and his wife's' campaign had achieved anything, said Mr Duffy, it had at least made the health authorities' change their screening procedures, so that now all children were screened before being vaccinated, something which had not occurred 20 years ago.
A Department of Health spokeswoman said yesterday that the cause of Alan's handicap had not yet been established and was still the subject of legal proceedings. "In that context, the Department has co operated fully with Alan's parents in providing all the relevant medical records available to them and their solicitors."
Mr Duffy reacted angrily to this, saying that only six weeks ago the family had received a letter from the Eastern Health Board regretting that all files relating to Alan had been destroyed in a fire in 1989.