Monthly Archives: July 2021

Latest -Press Watch, MABH

Dublin Universities Involved in Illegal Clinical Trials on Children

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The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes named the following people for conducting vaccine trials on children without obtaining permission. The trials were carried out through an arrangement with doctors in charge of various mother and baby homes. The authorities who ran these homes had no idea that children in their care were subjected to clinical trials. Yet they are falsely made to shoulder the blame, when in fact it is the universities who should get all the blame and pay compensation. However, not one has bothered to issue an apology since they were named in the commission report released in January 2021.

  • Professor Patrick Meenan Department of Medical Microbiology, University College, Dublin
  • Dr Irene Hillery, Department of Medical Microbiology, University College, Dublin
  • Dr Victoria Coffey, Trinity College, Dublin the first female president of the Irish Paediatric Association, the paediatric section of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland (RCSI)
  • Dr Margaret Dunleavy, the first female president of the Biological Society of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland

The commission concludes that in many of the trials conducted by these university researchers:

  • There was no import licence in place for the vaccine.
  • The researchers did not have a research licence which covered research carried out in the children’s institutions.
  • There is no evidence that consent was properly sought or received.
  • The results of the trial were not published.

In 1968: Dr Victoria Coffey, ran a trials of Glaxo Laboratories measles vaccine, at Pelletstown, Dublin. The commission say of this trial:

34.124 It is clear that this trial did not conform to the ethical and regulatory standards in place at the time. There is no evidence that Dr Coffey applied for or received a research licence under the Therapeutic Substances Act. There is no evidence that the relevant consents were sought or given.

Dr Victoria Coffey was also the institutional medical officer at Pelletstown and facilitated other vaccine trials:

34.70 The Commission has seen no documentary evidence to suggest that the researchers informed the matron or the Dublin Health Authority that children resident in Pelletstown were to be used as research subjects in a vaccine trial. It would appear that Dr Coffey may have been solely responsible for providing Professor Meenan and Dr Hillery with access to Pelletstown.

Nonsense Journalism

Even after the commission’s report was published, biased reporting continued with alacrity. The Irish Examiner published an article on 14 January 2021 where the claimed ‘there were at least 13 vaccine trials carried out on more than 43,000 children, according to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation.’ The entire article is littered with phrases cherry-picked from the report, conflating information from different areas of the report with as many negative facts as the author can find. I cannot find the total number 43,000 mentioned anywhere, and I doubt if the author summed up all the numbers, as the final report is a compilation of a series of individual reports. The report mentions a figure of 47,000 children who took part in a vaccine trial in Britain in 1964/65, and I surmise that the author mistakenly took this paragraph to be about Ireland and, even then, manage to get the figure wrong.

The author fails to mention that the early vaccination trials of the 1930s were done with the authorities’ support due to ‘one of the worst diphtheria epidemics ever recorded in Europe’. Instead, he continues to weave a tangled web, carefully selecting his facts, taken out of context, and conflating comments about the University College, Dublin studies of the 1960s/70s with earlier studies.

The journalist also fails to mention the commission’s conclusions to each trial: ‘there is no evidence of injury to the children involved as a result of the vaccines.’

 

EJ

Latest -Press Watch, MABH

Alternative Mother and Baby Home Report

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Many academics were made to look foolish because the final report of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes rubbished many of the allegations they presented as historical fact. Consequently, and to save face, 25 academics have produced an alternative mother and baby homes report or at least and alternative or reinterpreted executive summary.

However, the re-interpretation relies on feminism and the misleading application of today’s morals and standards — which did not exist in the past — but should have existed and had been applied by society and the government. It is a crime against history and the intellectual tradition.

Here are the six factors which the academics say indicates the State is to blame for mother and baby homes, with my observations. Note, blame is deliberately put on the state to force it to pay compensation.

 

1: The State funded all institutions in some way;

No news there. Perhaps the state should not have cared about the plight of unmarried mothers and their children and consequently not have funded care institutions. The commission of investigation also stated that the conditions were worse in secular institutions like county Homes but only the religious run homes have been singled out

 

2: The State regulated mother and baby homes through local government, inspection, funding, criminal, human rights, constitutional and administrative law. They add that where religious authorities objected to more intensive regulation and reform, State agencies preferred to negotiate rather than enforce regulatory arrangements;

That was not always the case. The state acted when appropriate and with the force of the laws in place at that time.

 

3: The State was aware of dangerous and degrading living conditions in many institutions, but did not use its statutory powers of prosecution and did not sanction institutions by depriving them of funding,

The living conditions of the poor in Ireland and elsewhere were far worse than found in any mother and baby home. Unmarried mothers under the British workhouse system in place before 1922 were treated far worse. Only Tuam and Kilrush, former workhouses were singled out by the commission of investigation as being below the standards of other buildings. However, its commentary was biased through an invalid comparison with the standards of today. Anachronistic issues like curtains between the beds in dormitories and a lack of central heating were cited as evidence of poor living conditions.

 

4: Irish law punished family foundation outside of marriage and showed no concern for reproductive justice;

‘Reproductive justice’ is a term which was never heard in the past as the concept is brand new. Applying such terms and concepts by arguing that they should have applied — even though they did not exist at that time — is not revisionism it is just tomfoolery.

 

5: The law criminalised aspects of access to contraception up to 1933 and almost all abortion up to 2019, making it almost impossible to avoid unwanted pregnancy;

Unwanted pregnancy can be easily avoided through abstinence. Besides in other countries where contraception was available continued to produce large quantities of unwanted children.

 

6: Irish law still inhibits efforts to seek accountability for abuses in the institutions by restricting affected people’s access to records of institutionalisation and family; their own records and those of close family members.

Pregnant women entered the homes on the basis that their anonymity would be guaranteed. Many of these mothers do not want to see their children and are primarily responsible for the halting their children from tracing them or contacting them.