FAILED TO REPORT
November 24, 2002The wheels
of Canadian justice may grind slowly, but they do grind, and that's why one of
the great injustices quietly buried over the last five years may be on the verge
of correction.
Five years after the report of Mr. Justice Horace Krever into what is commonly
called the "tainted blood scandal," the RCMP laid 32 charges last week
against the people they considered responsible. Krever found that some 60,000
Canadians were injected with HIV-tainted blood through the Canadian Red Cross.
One of the charges was laid against the Red Cross itself.
Also charged were two senior bureaucrats at Health Canada, the head of the Red
Cross blood program, a pharmaceutical company and one of its vice-presidents.
The charges include criminal negligence with a maximum penalty of 10 years
imprisonment.
It will be interesting to see, however, whether media coverage of the trial will
allow the facts to come out.
The media ignored the report's most damning elements. Three whole chapters of it
dealt specifically with the matter of how and why 24,000 people were known to be
infected with HIV, and 1,148 are known to have contracted AIDS, though the true
toll is probably double that, and a great many of them have since died.
So why?
The judge's answer to that question, covering 116 pages of his report, was
ignored by the Globe and Mail, the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal and the
Vancouver Province. The Vancouver Sun summarized these pages in a 12-line
paragraph, entirely lacking detail and names, though they were supplied in the
report. Yet it was these pages that led to the charges.
The explanation for this omission is undoubted. Krever blamed the whole tragedy
on the efforts of the Red Cross to escape charges of discrimination against
gays, and the newspapers didn't report it for the same reason. What Krever found
was this:
*While evidence mounted that taking blood donations from gay men was extremely
dangerous, the Red Cross ignored the warnings because it did not want to be
accused of discrimination under the human rights code.
*The Red Cross's own lawyer advised that it had nothing to fear from the code,
but it did have "the moral and legal obligation to protect the blood
recipient above all." The Red Cross ignored his advice.
*Some Red Cross doctors earmarked blood from gay men anyway so that it could be
destroyed. One said he dare not tell head office because he would have been
ordered to stop.
*A recommendation that male donors be asked whether they had had sex with
another male was rejected on grounds of intolerance. A recommendation that
donors be asked if they had AIDS was also rejected. They could only ask:
"Are you well?"
*When the Red Cross was finally persuaded to put out a pamphlet warning gay men
not to contribute, the pamphlet generally went unread by blood donors. When Red
Cross employees assured Krever they had widely distributed the pamphlet, Krever
satisfied himself they could not have in fact done so. In other words, they were
lying.
*The consequence of all this was that Canada was two and a half years behind the
Americans in adequately responding to the AIDS epidemic. Krever found many lives
could have been saved if the response had been more prompt.
"It is understandable the Red Cross should not want to offend donors,"
said Krever. "Discrimination against groups such as Haitians and homosexual
men was anathema to the Red Cross and, in its eyes, inconsistent with its
identity as a humanitarian organization ... At the same time, it was essential
for the safety of the blood supply that effective measures for risk reduction be
implemented, even if they created controversy."
None of this got into our liberal newspapers, though it was obviously a major
story. The coverage was restricted to the report's other
"non-intolerant" chapters. So the question now is: Will the media
cover-up continue when these cases come to trial?
What the situation evidences is Canada's deep commitment to
"tolerance" and "human rights" - so deep that it borders on
criminal lunacy.