The BBC’s Money Programme has catalogued the connection between a businessman who is now a minister in Blair’s government and the bad flu vaccine that was withdrawn by the FDA in 2004, causing large scale panic and deaths as the elderly waited in line trying to get innoculated.
From a British point of view, making this man a Peer (Lord) and his appointment as a minister responsible for defence procurement smacks of the worse sort of corruption and cronyism that is typical of “New Labour”.
Paul Rudd Drayson was enobled as Lord Drayson. He had previously donated more than £1 million to the NHS hospital that had treated his son and had given tens of thousands to the Labour Party. Shortly after he was made a Lord, he donated a sum not unadjacent to £1 million to Labour. Of course the two events must be seen as pure co-incidence as buying honours is strictly forbidden.
So what is the connection between Drayson and the “dodgy vaccine” when the factory was owned by the US company Chiron? Drayson made his initial fortune by a management buy-out of a confectionary company Trebor. He then came accross the work of a Oxford (UK) scientist who had invented the “prickless syringe” which delivers a drug in powdered form using a gas pulse, pushing the powder through the skin. The company the two formed, Powderject, purchased a vaccine factory in Liverpool in October 2000. While they owned it the factory made vaccines against polio, flu, hepatitis A and TB (the last referred to as “BCG”).
The factory had a history of doubtful products. Most significantly, the Irish government had found faults in a sub-batch of BCG vaccine which showed it was ineffective in protecting against TB. A report to the UK’s Department of Health showed that from 1989 to 2002, 9 batches of the vaccine were under-strength but that the results of the tests had been withheld from the regualtors. The Money Programme estimates that, based on the Irish statistics, some 900,000 innoculations could have failed to provide protection against a disease that is on the increase given the spread of AIDS and population movement from the Indian sub-continent to the UK (two separate factors I should emphasise). The potential cost of re-testing (which the present government considers unneccesary) and treatment of unprotected individuals puts his donation of £1 million in the shade. British regulators visited the factory 16 times during the period Powderject owned it. The FDA visited two times in 2001 and once in 2003 and found ‘significant objectionable conditions’ in the flu vaccine production line. As the BBC reported, the FDA “discovered that four out of five flu vaccine batches destined for the US market failed shelf-life tests and, perhaps most worrying of all, bacterial contamination of the manufacturing process for the flu jab. Bacteria including Klebsialla Oxytoca and Serratia were identified in factory areas where the flu vaccine was manufactured”.
In 2003, the plant was sold to Chiron for over £500 million and just over a year later the vaccine scandal broke in the US. Also in 2004, Drayson was the largest donor to the Labour Party. His personal/family wealth is estimated to be in excess of £80 million (seriously rich by UK standards) . He owns a top of the line luxury yacht and an estate in the South of France. He was made Minister for Defence Procurement after his big donation to Labour
