‘SOMETHING must be done’ is the bureaucratic response to everything that those in power, regardless of political persuasion, perceive to have gone wrong. Doing nothing is never an option and if, in responding, they can tie up those at the coal face in red tape and form-filling, so much the better. The Alder Hey scandal, involving the unauthorised retention of post-mortem body parts, was one thing that did go wrong. A response was necessary, but it has most definitely had unintended consequences, illustrated recently on an inquest into what may have been a covid-vaccine-related death.
The story begins with Clinical Governance, the subject of the 1998 Blairite White Paper, A First Class Service: Quality in the New NHS. It envisaged clinical and related research in the NHS not as a separate entity to quality of care, but as integral to it. A First Class Service contained proposals for bringing clinical governance and research governance closer together, perhaps even under a single framework.
Then there was the Alder Hey scandal. Some rogue clinicians and researchers had been retaining body parts from post-mortem examinations of children for their own research. This was not especially unusual except that they had omitted to ask consent of the parents. The scandal hit the headlines and the fallout continued for many years.
Alder Hey was a gift to the bureaucratically obsessed and put much wind into the sails of the clinical governance brigade. ‘Something must be done’, especially in the light of emotive newspaper headlines about ‘stockpiled’ organs and children being buried or cremated without their hearts or brains, unknown to their parents.
No prosecutions ensued but several doctors were struck off the medical register. It also transpired that unauthorised retention of body parts and foetuses was widespread across the United Kingdom.
In 1991, a new layer of regulation around clinical research was introduced, called Research Governance. It was a blunderbuss approach which led to concentric layers of scrutiny around even the most innocuous of research studies. All research was already scrutinised, since the 1990s, by NHS research ethics committees.
The consequences of the guidance around retention of body parts had widespread and, presumably, unintended consequences. In schools, medical schools, nursing schools and schools of biomedical science skip-loads of microscope slides with blood cells and tissue slices were dumped.
Any genuine human skeletons or bones (I used to have a complete specimen in my office) went the same way. It can be safely assumed that these were the result of bodies donated to medical science and not grave robbery or murder. But we did not have any proof of permission to retain these so out they went.
I served in Saudi Arabia in the First Gulf War in 1991 when we were given copious vaccinations (consent not sought) and blood samples were taken (ditto) for ‘research’. To comply with the precepts of Clinical and Research Governance, around 15 years later I received a letter from the Ministry of Defence telling me that they still had my blood samples and asking if I would like to have them back, or could they dispose of them. I opted for disposal.
Turning to the covid vaccines, I recently reported on an inquest into the sudden death of a young man, Kieran Duce. The details are reported elsewhere. The salient facts are that he was a fit 23-year-old with no relevant medical history, had been drinking alcohol but had a blood alcohol level well below that considered lethal, and he went to bed and died shortly after.
Kieran had been vaccinated three times with the Pfizer mRNA vaccine and there was evidence in one sample of the infiltration of white blood cells (lymphocytes) into his heart tissue. The presence of lymphocytes, while not diagnostic, could indicate the presence of myocarditis, a well-established adverse effect of the Pfizer vaccines.
Myocarditis may lead to an abnormal heart rhythm (arrhythmia) and death. But to establish if myocarditis was present, more samples from Kieran’s heart would be necessary. As it was, and according to procedures agreed by the Royal College of Pathologists, only three small samples were taken comprising approximately 1.5 per cent of the heart. To comply with regulations in the wake of Alder Hey, the rest of the heart had been discarded.
The death, incongruously, was attributed to alcohol. For those of us convinced of the harm caused by the Pfizer mRNA covid vaccines, this was a missed opportunity, perhaps, to establish the link directly to a death in a coroner’s court. For those with something to hide, perhaps, this was a lucky escape.
