Ireland to compensate medical trial victims but GSK refuses to contribute

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Ireland will soon launch a compensation scheme for children who received experimental vaccines without consent in the country’s notorious mother and baby homes but pharma giant GSK, whose predecessor companies profited from the trials, has resisted calls to contribute.

Under an €800mn scheme, which the Irish government said was due to open in the first quarter of this year, some 34,000 survivors of the Catholic institutions where tens of thousands of unmarried mothers were closeted for decades are eligible to apply for compensation.

Of those, some 300 infants and children were inoculated without consent in at least seven trials in homes between 1934 and 1973, including for diphtheria, polio, measles, rubella, and with so called four-in-one and five-in-one vaccines, according to a damning 2021 official report on the homes. Victims say the numbers could be far higher.

GSK’s resistance to paying compensation rekindles Ireland’s profound shame over the historical treatment of unmarried mothers. Its predecessor companies developed a long-standing relationship with scientists at University College Dublin to conduct the trials, which the report said flouted the regulatory and ethical standards in place at the time.

GSK said the tests were “bona fide” but admits there were “failings in the conduct of the trials, particularly in the context of seeking and/or receiving appropriate consents”. It has never issued an apology to victims.

The drugs used were developed by the Wellcome Foundation and Glaxo Laboratories, both now part of UK-listed GSK, which posted £22bn in turnover in the first nine months of last year.

“It’s absolutely scandalous. It’s tantamount to what the Nazis did,” said Francis Timmons, a councillor in south Dublin, referring to medical experiments in concentration camps during the second world war.