Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite · ‘We’ve messed up, boys’: Bad Blood
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n22/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/we-ve-messed-up-boys
Bayer’s heat-treated Factor VIII product was licensed in the US in February 1984, but it kept making the untreated version until August that year and didn’t stop selling old stock until the following summer. Armour’s parent company was told in October 1985 that its heat-treatment method wasn’t completely effective against HIV, but denied everything; only after two children in Birmingham and four patients in Newcastle were infected with HIV did the company admit to the DHSS that its product was unsafe. If non-heat-treated Factor VIII was banned in one country, the companies just sold it elsewhere. In the first quarter of 1985, #Bayer exported twenty thousand vials – more than five million units – of its old Factor VIII from the US to other parts of the world. Competition between pharmaceutical companies sometimes stimulated innovation, but it could just as easily generate a race to the bottom. The head of the CDC’s Aids taskforce told the companies that their actions ‘ultimately led to not only a lot of death and misery, but a destruction of your customers’. As McGoogan points out, the parallels with the present-day opioid crisis in the US are clear.