Mother and baby home vaccine trial subjects want answers 

Bessborough Mother and Baby Home, Cork. GSK has just launched what it calls an “enhanced information service” for former residents of mother and baby homes here regarding trials that took place.
Picture: Larry Cummins

The lads were fine until they got vaccinated.

This was what a nun told Paul Lynch's adoptive mother Doreen when they were very young.

The nun from Bessborough Mother and Baby Home had doted on Paul and his twin brother Gerard after they were transferred there shortly after their birth in 1968.

Both babies have been told they suffered bad reactions to vaccines they received while at the Cork City home. Paul endured painful boils all over his legs and back and Gerard bled from his ears.

Neither of them know what they were vaccinated with and they also don’t know exactly which drug company vaccinated them.

Paul found out recently that pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is offering information about vaccine trials carried out in Ireland between 1934 and 1973.

They have asked a lawyer to contact GSK, which is the company formed from a series of mergers, including the 1995 Burroughs Wellcome and Glaxo Laboratories merger, to seek further information.

He believes the trial he and his brother underwent was sometime between the end of 1968 and the middle of 1970.

GSK has just launched what it calls an “enhanced information service” for former residents of mother and baby homes here regarding trials that took place.

Summary notes on seven vaccine trials and two infant milk formula trials are contained in a new website and there is an area where former mother and baby home residents can request their personal files via a GSK ‘subject access request’ facility on the website.

The company says it is doing this in response to issues raised following the publication of the Commission of Investigation’s report.

Published in January this year, it confirmed that at least 13 vaccine trials were carried out by a variety of companies on more than 43,000 children.

None of the mothers, some of whom were as young as 15, appeared to have given consent for their children to be involved in the trials.

In addition, a number of the infants involved did not have their mothers with them at the time they were involved in the trials.

“I was too young to give my consent and I later found out my birth mother Mary didn’t give her consent for myself and my brother to be vaccinated,” Paul, 53, from Bandon, Co Cork, said. “I think what happened was wrong, and I am determined to get to the bottom of who did what.

“The new GSK documents facility does not appear to be of much use to us because for a start, we don’t know if it was them who vaccinated us. But also, they are only summary, or incomplete records of what they did while they were testing children.”