IRELAND
Irish Times
Brian McDonald
Wed, Jun 11, 2014
Medical professionals who oversaw vaccine trials at Irish mother and baby homes insisted the vaccines did no harm and were administered in the children’s best interests.
But no parental consent was sought for the trials. Doctors effectively granted each other permission to proceed in at least one of the trials.
Babies, almost all of them under 12 months and a small number of whom were either described at the time as mentally or physically “handicapped”, were used in the trials carried out on behalf of the British multinational pharmaceutical company Wellcome by two of Ireland’s most eminent medical scientists in the 1960s and 1970s.
Prof Patrick Meenan and Prof Irene Hillary, attached to the department of medical microbiology at University College Dublin, oversaw the Irish trials involving the three-in-one vaccine and its use in conjunction with the polio vaccine. But Prof Hillary insisted she did not regard them as trials. “I view them as investigations to improve things,” she said in a 1997 interview with me.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.