Here’s a new one, via a comment by Marie-Thérèse. From the Irish Independent in August 2010:
A CLERICAL child abuse victim revealed the full horror yesterday of the ‘human guinea pig’ drug trials carried out in church-run children’s homes.
Hundreds of children are feared to have been subjected to the experimental trials while in the care of the Catholic Church.
Now the victims’ cases could be reopened, as calls for the Government to deal with the scandal intensifies.
Legal action is being planned against GlaxoSmithKline and the Sacred Heart Order, which allowed the tests at the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork.
Campaigner and abuse survivor John Barrett, who was born at the home outside Cork city, was used as a ‘human guinea pig’ while in Lota industrial school, also in Cork.
You can explain about that, too, please, Vatican.
More than 25,000 youngsters spent time in Irish orphanages between 1960 and 1975, the period when the controversial one-in-four trials are believed to have taken place.
Kevin Cooney of the Adopted And Fostered Persons’ Association said: “These orphans were society’s most innocent and vulnerable people.
“The State participated in abusing the rights of children in their care. That is indefensible. There must be a full disclosure.”
Meanwhile Health Minister Mary Harney has been called on to instruct her officials to make available all relevant information regarding the ongoing vaccine trials.
The call comes following Mari Steed, 50, breaking her silence on Friday, in the Irish Independent, into how she was subjected to a controversial vaccine trial as a baby without her mother’s consent.
She said she the trial were carried out on her between December 1960 and October 1961, when she was between nine and 18 months old.