29 March 2022: Snape - B

It appears that the witness is reading parts of his evidence. That may be just an aide memoire. The reflection on his glasses doesn't help.

The BPL building frontage with it's two stylised columns presents a powerful entrance which hints at conspiracy theorists' dream imagery. Did I see the raw blood arriving in a non-refrigeration vehicle? On arrival it goes into the -40° storage area, but only after it has been booked in. Are these periods of non-refrigeration not dangerous? (Sorry for the double negative, it goes with the territory.)

The resulting blubbery precipitate is scarily whale-like. Human life and life in general is amazingly messy, especially when you get to microscopic or clinical levels. As organic beings in a necessarily interactive ecosystem it means that under the skin of nicely appearing existence is the gross or chaotic world we see in documentaries.

Through the Covid news reporting world we now live in, it might be that the type of masks being worn by staff are of limited effectiveness for protecting against the transmission of certain types of infective agents.

It should be recognised that the intelligence and effort involved in producing items such as factor concentrates is to be applauded. Scientific advancement in it's pure and de-commercialised manifestations is a wonderful facet of human progression.

Dr Snape is clear that the move to a new, modern, purpose-built facility led to immediately improved safety and quality of products. So any delay in providing the funding for improvements once the needs are identified is an acceptance of continuing with a low-grade and less safe products for patients, and all the resulting harms caused. Do we know the unit price of a single vial of FVIII back then, and how that relates to the operational budget for the whole setup of BPL?

The video mentioned a pool size of 13,000 but I wonder how long that had been the level used, and how long until that changed again. Dr Snape's diagram mentioned <7,500. I noticed standing water on the floor of the air quality room. Surely that should not have been there and could be a source of further mankying of the blood. Any video producer or editor should have picked up on this visual issue and changed the final cut of the video accordingly. Maybe it wasn't seen as significant enough.

The more Dr Snape talks about "Building 25" (the old building), the more it seems the Government were negligent for every day when it was highlighted to them the complete inadequacy of the facility, especially as new viruses emerged. It was more and more dirty blood on their hands. Dr Snape laughed (inaudibly) when he saw the 5 litre packs of plasma being opened by hand in the old centre. He did not hold back in supporting the series of damning criticisms from the Medicines Inspectorate. And the metal spatulas scraping across metal surfaces would likely cause more than just problems with noise pollution.

Automation is touted as an automatic improvement. That might be right, but then the pressure falls on the stringency, adherence, and monitoring of the cleaning regime.

The witness described fractionation as a three-stool milking process to obtain: factor concentrates; albumin; and immunoglobulin (I think). They used the word "potency" because you cannot weigh FactorVIII. "Purity" and "yield" were also usefully explored in the context of fractionation. Dr Snape also spoke about "recovery" being the yield of product accessible to the patient.

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