8 July 2022: Grayson - D
The second afternoon evidence session with Carol Grayson shifted to the GMC (General Medical Council). She expressed a concern about their processes wherein documents submitted by doctors in their defence were not routinely available to those who may have made complaints. Only much later were those documents obtained, and when eventually read, these highlighted the factual errors included by doctors which Carol could not refute because she was not allowed to receive them to know what was said wrongly about any doctor and thus how the GMC made its decisions. She hoped the Inquiry might make a recommendation to encourage a review of their systems (if they have not already been reviewed in the intervening period).
Carol had various contacts with people in the US, not least, Kelly Duda the documentary filmmaker. It gave her and others access to the information the US groups and lawyers had. It also led to court action which prompted the Pharma companies to recognise they had a problem, and some payments were made. Carol gave harrowing examples of the unsafe practices operating in the US, including the deliberate targeting of gay mens’ bathhouses to study Hepatitis-rich blood with the unused amounts being put into the pooled blood. Some of the pools in the US included 400,000 donations. (For comparison, the maximum in the UK processing units was around 25,000 individual donations.)
One of the important successes of Carol’s work has been the re-discovery of previously lost or destroyed documents, but even nowadays there are problem, for example, with the National Archive destroying the notes attaching Carol’s donated documents to the Archive on behalf of others
Carol had more recently established a communication channel with Andy Burnham. He had previously been seen as someone who had ignored campaigners. He advised that he had been told by officials there was nothing more to do in relation to infected blood. His final speech in the Commons referred to certain document which showed there has been an industrial-scale cover-up, and these had come from Carol.
Finally, Counsel asked the witness to imagine the difference it would have made if the Government had responded back at the time when these issues were emerging. She gave a personal reflection of her life had it not involved her unrelenting campaigning. She explains what she thinks she and Pete might have done together. And in the period since he had died, she may have been able to enter into another relationship, and to travel more. The witness mentioned how she has expanded her campaigning not only to support haemophiliacs in other parts of the world, such as Israel, but in different spheres, such as prisoner exchanges in Afghanistan.
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