30 March 2022: Snape - B

Sticking with the numbers game of pool sizes, it seems Sir Brian's pre-break questions had anticipated the direction to which Counsel were planning to take the evidence. At times, Dr Snape does come across as quite an earnest and reflective witness, including when referencing his own actions that in hindsight might have been done differently. He is not admitting actual fault, but more a way of working that was particularly his own. This is in stark contrast to, for example, Ken Clarke who was belligerent, arrogant, carelessly offhand, and decidedly uncooperative.

In this vein, it is refreshing to see the witness acknowledge his own recollective slowness by returning to a previous question and seeking to provide greater clarity. Of course, some have done this as a way of seeking to minimise the potential impact of what they had previously said; and of course, this did not involve them speaking with someone during the course of their evidence.

Then it was on to the sticky subject of labelling. Dr Snape's quality control role included approving the text to be printed on the labels. Contributions to proposed wording were disseminated in a "starburst" way. He said the final say was his role, "probably"(?). Over time, various statutory bodies were referred to during label design.

Dr Snape says that at the design stage the labels were targeted at both clinicians and patients. A set of three labels were displayed. On a 1985 label, the wording of the warning "... cannot be assumed to be free of hepatitis virus," still seems to be an unusual sentence construction. Nobody considered it necessary to include AIDS as part of the warning then. In hindsight, it was difficult to get a clear answer about the reflective usefulness or necessity to include a reference to AIDS on that label.

Later labels developed the warning and did add in AIDS. But the number of donations used in production was removed. That was a deliberate decision, but Dr Snape could not recall the rationale for its removal.

Reverting chronologically to the arrival of AIDS, the risk of transmission by blood products was at first considered not conclusive. We have certainly heard that trope more than once before. It seems the view that the Americans overreacted was due to a resistance to anything that would hinder production. While in the UK, there was a hint of resistance as seen in the possibility of reverting to cryo due to AIDS, with a document saying doing so may become "... irresistible, whether logical or not". The question is, what would have been the "not" logical reason for irresistibly reversing back to cryo?

The session ended with that annoyingly popular refrain of there not being a consensus in the UK about the risk of AIDS being transmitted via factor concentrates. (Yadda, yadda, yadda.)

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