Infected blood scandal in the United Kingdom

From the 1970s to the early 1990s, tens of thousands of people were infected with hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV as a result of receiving infected blood or infected clotting factor products in the United Kingdom. Many of the products were imported from the United States, and distributed to patients by the National Health Service. Most recipients had haemophilia or had received a blood transfusion following childbirth or surgery. More than 30,000 patients are estimated to have received contaminated blood, resulting in thousands of deaths. In July 2017, the then Prime Minister Theresa May announced an independent public inquiry into the scandal, after successive governments since the 1980s had refused to do so. The final report was published on 20 May 2024, concluding that the scandal could have been largely avoided, patients were knowingly exposed to "unacceptable risks", and that doctors, the NHS and the government tried to cover up what happened by "hiding the truth".

People with haemophilia were principally infected via the plasma-derived product known as factor VIII, a processed pharmaceutical product sourced from the United States and elsewhere. The creation of these products involved dangerous plasma donation pooling manufacturing processes that led to infected products. Large groups of paid donors were used, as many as 60,000 per batch, and included prisoners and drug addicts. It only required one infected donor to contaminate an entire batch, which would then infect all recipients.

This was at a time when the practice of paying donors for whole blood in the United States had effectively ceased. The UK did not import whole blood from abroad, but it did import large quantities of factor VIII given to those infected, as described in the documentary Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal. The UK imported these products because it did not produce enough domestically, and efforts to achieve self-sufficiency were inadequately funded. A study published in 1986 showed that 76% of those who received commercial clotting-factor products became infected with HIV, as opposed to none of those who only received the previous treatment – cryoprecipitate.

While then Prime Minister David Cameron apologised on behalf of the British government to those affected, no government, healthcare or pharmaceutical entity in the UK has formally admitted any liability in the scandal. As part of the public inquiry, 3,000 surviving victims were awarded interim compensation payments in August 2022, paid urgently due to the extremely high death rate of survivors.

On 20 May 2024, the six-year-long "Infected Blood Inquiry" was finally reported covering more than 2000 pages and describing the scandal as "the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS".

On the following day, 21 May 2024, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, John Glen, announced a new Infected Blood Compensation Authority to administer a new compensation scheme for victims.