PAY UP

UK Should Pay Tainted-Blood Victims ASAP, Inquiry Says

The head of a 2019 inquiry into the tainted-blood tragedy is urging the United Kingdom to pay each surviving victim and the families of those who died at least $120,000.

In the 1970s and 80s, the British government distributed blood tainted with HIV and Hepatitis C to thousands of hemophiliacs and other victims, 2,400 of whom died from the sicknesses. Now, the head of a 2019 inquiry into the tragedy is urging the United Kingdom to pay each surviving victim and the families of those who died at least $120,000. The government will consider the inquiry’s recommendation “with the utmost urgency,” it said Saturday. “Successive governments, which I was part of one, didn’t act as quickly as they should have, and we need to recognize this as a terrible, terrible injustice,” said a former U.K. health secretary. The inquiry chair said Friday that the payments should not wait until his probe is finished due to the long timeline and the victims and families’ “profound physical and mental suffering.” The contaminated blood was mostly imported from the U.S., and it is largely considered the worst treatment disaster in British history.