‘Day of Shame’: Sunak apologises for Britain’s infected-blood scandal

Paris: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has issued a stark apology to victims and families of one of the country’s worst healthcare failures after a damning report found that blood contaminations that killed 3000 people and infected more than 30,000 others could have been largely avoided.

“This is a day of shame for the British state,” Sunak told MPs in the House of Commons, where he made a “wholehearted and unequivocal apology” for what he said were repeated failings by British officials.

“I am truly sorry,” he said, just hours after publication of a long-awaited report that identified a “catalogue of failures” over two decades by government and medical officials in Britain, most of them avoidable errors that were then covered up.

The 2000-page report is the product of a nearly six-year inquiry that the British government ordered in 2017 after decades of pressure from victims and their families.

“Today’s report shows a decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life,” Sunak said. “At every level, the people and institutions in which we place our trust failed in the most harrowing and devastating way.”

He vowed that the government would pay “comprehensive compensation” to those infected and to their families but said details of those plans would be released on Tuesday. He also promised that the government would study the report’s “wide-ranging recommendations” to avoid a repeat of the failures.

The British government in 2022 had agreed to distribute to each victim an interim payment of £100,000 (about $191,000).

The independent report puts a harsh spotlight on the state-run National Health Service, identifying “systemic, collective and individual failures” by authorities as tens of thousands of people were infected by tainted blood transfusions or contaminated blood products from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Authorities at the time and successive governments refused to acknowledge those failings, the report found.