As Mick Mason and I watched the prime minister deliver his apology to the victims of the contaminated blood scandal on Monday, we were both close to tears. It was the culmination of a long and often deeply frustrating journey we had been on together.
The first time I spoke to Mason, I wrote him off as a conspiracy theorist. It was 2001 and I was a naive, 21-year-old trainee reporter at the Sunday Mercury in Birmingham who by chance picked up his call to the newsroom. That conversation changed my life.
Mason, who was then 34 years old, told me he was a haemophiliac who had been infected with hepatitis B and C and HIV after receiving blood products via the NHS that had been riddled with the deadly diseases. A near-certain death sentence had been passed on him as a teenager. As if that weren’t bad enough, he had recently received the devastating news that he may also have caught vCJD after receiving blood from a donor who later died of the human form of mad cow disease.
It was such a nightmarish story I found it hard to believe. But every word of it turned out to be true — just like the dozens of other harrowing accounts I have heard from the victims of this easily preventable scandal, which has claimed thousands of lives in the UK and destroyed tens of thousands more. Mason was in the small minority of those who survived – though he still doesn’t know if he has vCJD, as testing isn’t available.
For more than 20 years, I’ve written about these innocent men and women and their families as they demanded justice. Many of them, already facing terminal illnesses, have suffered the indignity of being forced into financial hardship while being stonewalled by the authorities whose negligence caused their suffering in the first place.
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At the heart of this tragedy is contaminated blood. In the 1970s and 1980s, nearly 5,000 UK haemophiliacs contracted HIV or hepatitis C after being infected by tainted blood-clotting products. More than 3,000 have since died.
Factor VIII, a clotting protein, was seen as a miracle cure for haemophilia, a genetic disorder that means the blood fails to clot. But demand far outstripped supply, and much of the product ended up being sourced cheaply from across the Atlantic.
The US operated a dangerously deregulated donation system. Because people were paid for their blood, much of it came from donors who badly needed cash. As a result, blood sourced from high-risk groups — including prisoners, sex workers, drug addicts and alcoholics — was packaged up and sold around the world. To make matters worse, the donations were pooled, which meant a single batch of factor VIII could include blood from as many as 60,000 donors. If just one of those donors were infected, the entire batch could be contaminated.
The number of people who have lost their lives makes it the deadliest man-made disaster in postwar British history, far outstripping Hillsborough, Grenfell and Lockerbie.
Yet until the Infected Blood Inquiry published its findings last week, no organisation or individual had ever been held to account. Instead, the victims who were lucky enough to survive have spent the past 40 years desperately demanding answers.
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Among them was Glenn Wilkinson, a former engineer who was infected with hepatitis C, a potentially fatal liver infection, in 1983, having received a contaminated blood product after a routine dental operation. Wilkinson, who has become a stalwart of the campaign, was first introduced to me by Diana Johnson, the Labour MP for Hull North. Johnson and I became an unusual double act, trying to keep up the pressure on ministers.
When I joined the Sunday Express as political editor in May 2014, this struck me as an opportunity to help raise the profile of the campaign. The injustice of Wilkinson’s story, as he battled through ill health to draw attention to the scandal, had touched me deeply. It seemed incomprehensible to me that such continuing and unjust suffering could be ignored indefinitely.
As I started to look more deeply into the controversy, Wilkinson introduced me to another veteran campaigner, Mike Dorricott, who left a lasting impression on me. Dorricott had been given contaminated blood in 1982 during a routine dental operation, despite only having a mild form of haemophilia. By the time I met him, Dorricott, who had been battling hepatitis C, had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and given only months to live.
Despite his travails, Dorricott retained a joie de vivre that seemed incongruous considering the hand fate had dealt him. Such was the force of his personality that Dorricott managed to win over his local MP Jeremy Hunt, who as health secretary made a promise he eventually fulfilled last week — to properly compensate the victims of the contaminated blood scandal.
Sadly, Dorricott did not live long enough to see it. On March 25, 2015, he collapsed and was rushed to hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne. The 47-year-old spent the last days of his life at the Freeman Hospital surrounded by the people he loved most: his mother, sister, wife and two daughters. His skin had long since turned yellow from liver failure and he could no longer breathe unaided. He was reduced to speaking in a whisper.
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Even as he drifted in and out of consciousness, Dorricott appealed to his sister, asking her to remind me that his dying wish was for justice for him and his family. “Tell her to keep going,” he implored them, in an effort to ensure that his voice would continue to be heard even after death. I wish he could have been there on Monday.
When Theresa May finally announced a public inquiry into the infected blood scandal in July 2017, it was the proudest moment of my career.
The decision came after Diana Johnson and I organised a letter, signed by the leaders of all the main political parties, calling for a Hillsborough-style inquiry. Crucially, the signatories included Nigel Dodds of the Democratic Unionist Party, which was propping up May’s government in a “confidence and supply” arrangement.
The Sunday Times, where I was working by that point, published the letter. Just days later — and more than 17 years after I had written my first story about the scandal — the government finally agreed to the inquiry. It seemed almost too good to be true.
Last week, that inquiry finally delivered its damning report. With it came vindication for the victims of this appalling tragedy.
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Following Sunak’s apology on Monday, the Victims and Prisoners Bill, which will create the new Infected Blood Compensation Authority, was passed into law on Friday. Payments worth more than £10 billion are expected to be paid to the victims, including a second interim payment of £210,000 this summer.
But the report also brought great sorrow that so many titans of the campaign had not lived long enough to see their day of truth. They include my friends Mike Dorricott, Nick Sainsbury, John Cornes, and husband and wife Steve Dymond and Su Gorman. I hope that they can now rest in peace knowing that justice, while certainly delayed, has finally been delivered.
The revised and updated paperback version of Death in the Blood, by Caroline Wheeler, was published earlier this month (Headline, £12.99
