Health ‘has no data’ on fifth child vaccine trial

The Department of Health has said it has "no information" on where, or in what institution, a previously undisclosed fifth vaccine trial on children here in the 1960s took place.

The trial, revealed by the Irish Examiner on Monday, was carried out in 1965 on 34 infants by Glaxo Laboratories — a legacy company of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

GSK has previously only admitted to four vaccine trials having ever been carried out in Ireland.

Uncovered by Michael Dwyer of UCC’s School of History in an article in The Lancet in August of 1965, the measles trial was conducted by Irene Hillary and Patrick Meenan of UCD’s microbiology department and AJ Beale of Glaxo Laboratories.

Although the report does not specify where the trial took place, the reference to the reaction to the vaccines being monitored by “the adults looking after the children” and the fact that follow-ups were done on all the children from day six to day 14 at 6pm, seem to indicate that the children were in a group setting. There is no mention of parental consent.

GSK said it did not agree that the above references were evidence that the trial was carried out on children in care, but did not state where or in what institution the trial may have occurred.

In a statement, the Department of Health said it had “no information” regarding this latest trial and said any information it had was summarised into the interdepartmental committee to inquire into Mother and Baby Homes published in July which covered “known vaccine trials in institutions”.

“The Interdepartmental Group on Mother and Baby Homes Report contains a summary of Dr Kiely’s report and subsequent developments.

“The department has not sourced any information regarding the ‘fifth vaccine trial’,” said the statement.

However, the interdepartmental report only refers to three trials — despite GSK publicly admitting a fourth in 2011 and UCC’s Michael Dwyer uncovering evidence in June of 1930-1935 trials of a Burroughs Wellcome vaccine for diphtheria carried out on 2,000 children in residential institutions.

Speaking yesterday, Mr Dwyer said the latest revelations about the scale of the vaccine trials should be of interest to children’s minister Dr James Reilly, but have yet to be acknowledged by any official source.

“The political response to these revelations must now be regarded as faux political outrage.

“It would seem that the furore was little more that an appropriation of the very real concerns of vaccine trial survivors for political gain.”

“No official acknowledgement of the vaccine trials surely equates to no official interest. And this is not solely a government issue.

“It is a cross-party effort to minimise the significance of the findings, to sideline the concerns of vaccine trial survivors, in a bid to prioritise political, professional and commercial concerns,” he said.

Former head of the Children’s Rights Alliance and now Senator Jillian van Turnhout said that the upcoming inquiry now needed to get the full truth behind the trials and not a partial one.