Canada’s Tainted Blood
By Larry Romanoff, February 07, 2022
In the early 1980s, thousands of Canadians were infected with HIV and at least another 60,000 or more with hepatitis C, from tainted blood products distributed by the Canadian Red Cross who were responsible for the country’s blood donation system. This agency took most of the blame for the public health calamity, but there were many others involved in the scandal, producing a web of disastrous decisions heavily contaminated with a dysfunctional negligence that bordered on – and sometimes crossed the line into – criminality. In the end, facing multiple accusations of criminal negligence, the Red Cross was stripped of its blood collection responsibilities and a new Federal agency established, with billions of dollars being paid in compensation to the victims.
The root cause of this enormous disaster was the existence of an unregulated and uncontrolled medical-pharma industry in the US, resulting in the private-enterprise, profit-maximising commercialisation of the business of blood collection and distribution. One result of the American system was the collection of blood from US prisons, the most high-risk of all sources but one with a captive population and a fundamentally criminal environment perfectly suited to the style of the US pharma companies. At the time, Canada imported a great deal of blood from the US, primarily through a US blood broker named Continental Pharma-Cryosan, who sold their products to a Canadian blood fractionator named Connaught Laboratories which was then a Canadian state-owned company. Connaught re-sold its blood and blood products to the Canadian Red Cross for final distribution to hospitals and other medical facilities.
In the final analysis, it seems Connaught Labs carried most of the responsibility for the tragedy and should have been apportioned most of the blame. In 1971, more than ten years prior to this disaster, the Canadian government had forbidden the practice of collecting blood from prisons because of the high risk of infections, and Connaught was fully aware of this fact, so purchasing blood from US prisons was hardly an acceptable alternative. The shipments of US blood were not specifically identified as originating in US prisons, the shipper merely being identified as ‘ADC’, without specifying that the acronym stood for the ‘Arkansas Department of Corrections’ – the prison system. However, supporting documentation which included reports from the US FDA did clearly identify the source, but the executives at Connaught claimed they didn’t bother to read them. The director of blood fractionation at Connaught, a Dr. Anthony Magnin, testified that collecting blood from prisoners “was not considered inherently a problem”, and that the identifying documents were either not read at all “or they were read and not acted upon”.
