The next time you are sneezing with hay fever and you reach for a bottle of Beconase nasal spray in the pharmacy, ponder this: is it ethical to add to the coffers of the company that makes it? GSK Plc is a pharmaceutical behemoth that rang up worldwide sales of £29.3 billion (€33 billion) in 2022. Beconase is a GSK product, as are Betnovate cream for skin conditions and insect bites, Seroxat antidepressants, and Ventolin inhaler. Add in other products as well as myriad vaccines and antibiotics and there is hardly a home in the country that has not been penetrated by the London-headquartered multinational.*
For two years now, ever since Judge Yvonne Murphy published the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother & Baby Homes in January 2021, GSK has been refusing to contribute to the State’s €800 million redress scheme for survivors, despite two of its companies having commissioned unlicensed vaccine trials on child residents that contravened the ethical and regulatory standards of the time. The trials for Glaxo Laboratories and Wellcome, which were subsequently acquired by the corporation now known as GSK, were conducted on some of Ireland’s most afflicted little children without their parents’ or guardians’ consent, or even their knowledge.
The commission identified 13 vaccine trials for illnesses such as measles, polio, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough up to 1998. Seven of them – and a possible eighth in 1965 that the Commission was unable to verify – plus two milk formula trials were conducted in mother and baby homes from 1934 to 1973. In meetings with Roderic O’Gorman, the Minister for Children, the pharma giant has repeatedly refused to pay up because, it claimed, there was no evidence that any child had been injured. This defence is exceedingly arguable.
Podcast: Why won't GSK pay mother and baby home vaccine trial victims?
According to Murphy’s report, a Dublin trial (Trial G) for Wellcome that started in June 1973 in St Patrick’s on the Navan Road, Madonna House in Blackrock and both the Cottage Home and the Bird’s Nest in Dún Laoghaire was almost immediately halted, before being restarted, when “a significant number of adverse reactions were reported among children involved”. Two of the children were hospitalised suffering “infantile spasms”. Of the 53 children recruited in the homes for the trial, two had Down syndrome, one had a facial deformity, another had club foot and another had congenital heart disease. One child was described as “mixed race”. At least seven of the mothers had psychiatric disorders or were recorded as being “mentally handicapped”. One of the mothers was 15 years old.
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Ergo, some of those mothers did not have the legal capacity to consent to sex at the time of conception. When it came to using their children as trial fodder, their consent was not sought either, according to the commission.
In July 1968, Glaxo made out a £230 cheque – worth about €3,800 now – personally payable to Victoria Coffey, a Trinity College teaching doctor and a medical officer at St Patrick’s home, where she was running a measles vaccine trial
It has emerged in documents released under Freedom of Information law that O’Gorman was advised by his officials when he met GSK executives that there had been a commercial gain to be made from the vaccine trials. The size of the companies’ gains may be immeasurable but they implicitly acknowledged the benefits by way of “grants” and gifts they gave to Irish doctors who ran the trials for them.
In July 1968, Glaxo made out a £230 cheque – worth about €3,800 now – personally payable to Victoria Coffey, a Trinity College teaching doctor and a medical officer at St Patrick’s home, where she was running a measles vaccine trial on behalf of the company. Three months later, Glaxo paid her a further £250 “to meet” expenses. Regarding that trial, the commission said it had “not been able to identify the children involved” and therefore could not state if there had been any adverse consequences for them.
‘A reimbursement’
In March 1996, Glaxo offered Eithne Conlon, the assistant medical director at Bessborough in Cork, free air travel to England for a holiday “as reimbursement” for operating a milk trial in the mother and baby home.
At the outset of Trial G, Patrick Meenan, who was then the head of UCD’s microbiology department, asked Wellcome for money to employ a laboratory technician and for a cheque made out to him personally for £1,650. He also requested two payments of £1,650 and £650 for his colleague, Irene Hillery, the head of the Virus Reference Laboratory at UCD.
Journalists began reporting on the vaccine trials in mother and baby homes more than 30 years ago and yet there are people who still do not know if they were used as test specimens
When an earlier State inquiry into vaccine trials had been set up under the aegis of a commission examining child abuse in residential institutions, Meenan and Hillery instituted separate court actions claiming their reputations would be damaged by the association with child abuse. Hillery’s lawyer argued in court that the decision to investigate the trials arose from “lurid and uninformed media comment” and that nobody appeared to have been injured. That inquiry was abandoned in 2004 after the superior courts ruled in favour of the two doctors.
Journalists began reporting on the vaccine trials in mother and baby homes more than 30 years ago and yet there are people who still do not know if they were used as test specimens. In a purported concession to the Irish government, GSK condescended to provide information to participants, but only if they sought it. The company cited “significant ethical concerns” about volunteering personal data without the individual participant’s consent. So it would seem that GSK has learned something about consent and ethics, after all. Something and nothing.
[ The Irish Times view on mother and baby homes: GSK must take responsibilityOpens in new window ]
An explicit requirement for at least one trial in Bessborough was that the child subjects had to be less than one year old. How are these people expected to know that, as babies, they were conscripted as test specimens, especially when not even their mothers were told?
Ethical considerations can mean different things to different people and different again to commercial enterprises. Asking GSK nicely to make a gesture of amends has proved an exercise in vain by the Department of Children.
Maybe the rest of us should remember that the next time hay fever comes calling and we reach for an over-the-counter nasal spray.
*This article was edited on Saturday, March 4th, 2023 to remove outdated information on GSK’s product range.