Rerun: The Treatment (Bayer AG)
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Ryan White wasn't like the other kids. That much became apparent on his first day of life, December 6, 1971.

When Ryan was circumcised as a newborn baby, he could not stop bleeding. The doctors ran some tests and a few days later, Ryan White was diagnosed with hemophilia, a hereditary disorder that prevents blood from clotting. Even minor injuries like small cuts and scrapes can lead to severe blood loss. But the greater concern for hemophiliacs is internal bleeding, which over time can lead to damaged organs and joints.

There is no cure. Hemophilia was something that Ryan White and his family would have to learn to manage. And despite his condition, Ryan was able to live a fairly normal childhood.

mostly thanks to being extra careful on the playground, as well as new medication that allowed hemophiliacs to treat themselves at home. Every week, Ryan's mother, Jeannie, would inject her son with Factor VIII concentrate, a product created from the pulled plasma of as many as 20,000 different blood donors. This weekly infusion contained the "ingredient" that hemophiliacs lacked for sufficient clotting. Factor VIII could stop bleeding or prevent it from even starting.

This treatment had become increasingly common among hemophiliacs during the 1970s. It had given those afflicted an entirely new lease on life. Before factor VIII, hemophiliacs existed in a state of constant pain and emergency room visits. They were often relegated to crutches, wheelchairs, and lengthy hospital stays when the bleeding would occur.

Others were permanently disabled from the relentless pressure on their joints, but not anymore. Factor VIII was a lifesaver, and it was widely accepted by hemophiliacs with open arms and open veins.

However, as much of a miracle drug as it may have been, factor VIII concentrate did not treat pneumonia.

which is what 13-year-old Ryan White was admitted to the hospital with on December 17, 1984. And after a biopsy on his lungs, doctors discovered something else extremely alarming. Ryan's T-cell count had dropped to 25. The T-cell count of a healthy individual could be as high as 1,200. This meant that Ryan's immune system was practically non-existent.

After further tests a few days later, doctors confirmed that Ryan White had been compromised by a new virus. He had developed acquired immune deficiency syndrome, more commonly referred to as AIDS. This is Ryan's mother, Jeannie. From the very first, you know, he asked me, am I going to die? And this was when he was first diagnosed. He said, am I going to die? And I thought, gosh, how am I going to answer this? And I said, we're all going to die someday. We just don't know when.

Little was known about HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s, when the mysterious illness was quickly growing to epidemic proportions. Experts couldn't quite yet explain what was causing some people's immune systems to stop functioning, but there were some trends emerging. Medical professionals had found that the virus was spreading mainly throughout four different groups of people.

1. Homosexuals 2. Intravenous drug users 3. Haitians and 4. Hemophiliacs. Hemophiliacs like Ryan White. Hemophiliacs were being diagnosed with HIV at an alarming rate because the plasma they injected on a weekly basis had not been screened for the newly discovered virus. In fact, the tests for the virus didn't even exist at the time.

and it only took one infected donor out of the pool of 20,000 to taint the whole batch of Factor VIII, a tainted batch that was then bottled and sold and injected into the bodies of hemophiliacs like Ryan White. Well, we didn't realize that the drug that we thought was saving their life, all hemophiliacs really at the time, was the drug that ended up taking their life because it contained the HIV virus, but we didn't know it at the time. Ryan White was given three to six months to live.

But that time came and went and his condition improved. Ryan had fought hard and won. And once he was back on his feet, Ryan wanted nothing more than to return to a life of normalcy. To forget about his conditions. To forget about dying. Ryan White just wanted to be a kid again.

Ryan White wanted to go to school, and his doctors cleared him to return.

Even in early 1985, it was common knowledge that HIV was not an airborne disease. HIV is transmitted through bodily fluids. So Ryan White posed very little risk to the students, faculty, and parents of Western Middle School in Rushaville, Indiana.

but the students, faculty, and parents of Western Middle School disagreed and were not very welcoming. I don't think he should be here. If people with chickenpox and measles can't come, why should he? There's been a lot of rumors that

When he gets mad, he spits on people. You guarantee that my daughter will not get AIDS by helping him? If you can't, then he shouldn't be in school. I don't want to take the chance of my child being right next to him and maybe accidentally being sneezed on. More than 100 parents and 50 teachers signed a petition to formally ban Ryan White from the school and threatened a civil lawsuit if he were readmitted.

and they got their wish. Ryan's formal request to attend school in person was denied by the superintendent. Instead, Ryan was given a telephone number to call to listen in to the classroom lessons, an experience that Ryan would later claim was worse than being sick. I don't want nobody else to get it, and I can see where they're worried.

But I mean, if my doctor says it's okay to go back, I mean, I don't see no reason why I can't. So the White family sued the school in August 1985. The science was on their side. Jeannie figured that testimony from a few medical experts was all it would take to get Ryan readmitted. But the battle dragged on for months. And the longer it took, the uglier it got. The cashiers at the grocery store even started placing Jeannie's change on the counter in front of her because they were afraid to touch her hands.

It is God's punishment, they would whisper behind her back. Retribution for being gay. It was really bad. People were really cruel. People said he had to be gay. He had to have done something bad or wrong or he wouldn't have got it. That kind of harassment continued for 14 months, even after a court ruled that Ryan White could return to school.

Kids in the hallways would call him queer. The cafeteria required him to eat with disposable plates and silverware. He had to use a separate bathroom, and he was not allowed to attend gym class. Some parents even pulled their kids out of Western Middle School upon the return of the AIDS kid. Ryan White had never felt so alone, but he fought valiantly. Not once did he hang his head in shame in the face of widespread bullying.

and he was more than willing to share what he had learned about his disease to anyone that cared to listen. Ryan did his best to destigmatize living with HIV. He was the innocent, white, suburban face that hid closer to home for a lot of people in middle America. You know, I can't blame them for being scared because it was new to everybody at the time. And, you know, when you don't know about something, you're going to be afraid of it. There was no hate in his heart, no bitterness,

Ryan White understood that the people who were being mean to him were quote "victims of their own ignorance" unquote. That familiar malady of misinformation or lack thereof. Who do you blame? What are they so afraid of? It's hard to stay angry at somebody that's just so goddamn pathetic. Well they marked my folders. They marked fag and other cruel things.

I was talking about, you know, they accused you of what, spitting on the vegetables or something? Yeah, spitting on vegetables and taking bites out of cookies and putting them back. Why would people do that? Just to be spiteful or because they're scared? Well, I think they were scared first and foremost, and it just led to where, you know, their fear just took control of them and they just believed what they wanted to believe.

Fear made certain residents of Kokomo, Indiana break windows on the White family's house. Fear compelled them to slice the tires of the White family's car. One day, Fear even put a bullet through the White family's living room wall. Luckily, nobody was home. "I don't want to die in Kokomo," Ryan told his mother shortly after the scare. So the family moved, about 25 minutes away, to Cicero, Indiana.

Ryan chose that town because he liked the local cemetery. He informed his mom that he wouldn't mind being buried there someday. Ryan also liked the school that welcomed him as one of their own. They weren't afraid to shake his hand, and Ryan White had been shaking a lot of hands in the late 80s. His legal battle with the school system made national headlines and magazine covers and caught the attention of A-list celebrities like Elton John.

Ryan White is an example of probably the most tremendous courage and tremendous dignity that a young person could have possibly shown in his life after being shown such bigotry and such abuse. Ryan White had become a household name. He appeared on daytime talk shows. He made a cameo in the made-for-TV movie about his story. Michael Jackson bought him a new car.

Ryan also attended an Oscars party with Nancy and Ronald Reagan, the former president who failed to publicly mention AIDS until 1985 after 5,000 people, mostly homosexual men, had already been killed by the disease. Nice going, Ron. Even though Ryan White did enjoy the newfound fame and attention, he said he'd trade it all to be free of his illness, an illness that reemerged with a vengeance in early 1990.

That March, Ryan was admitted to the hospital with a respiratory tract infection. He was 18 years old and weighed only 60 pounds when they put him on a respirator. It seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind. Ryan is getting plenty of moral support. Elton John, who Ryan met at an AIDS fundraiser, came to visit. Michael Jackson, Johnny Cash, Joe Montana called. Hundreds have sent cards, telegrams, flowers.

Ryan White died on April 8th, 1990, five years later than originally predicted, and one month before his high school graduation. This nation lost one of its leading figures in the battle against AIDS. 18-year-old Ryan White has died of the disease. President Bush said all Americans were touched by his courage, strength, and ability to continue fighting.

There was standing room only at Ryan White's funeral. More than 1500 people attended, including Ryan's buddies Michael Jackson and Elton John, the latter of whom played a song dedicated to Ryan called "Skyline Pigeon." There's a 6'8" gravestone at the Cesario Cemetery that marks Ryan's final resting place. It was vandalized and desecrated on at least four separate occasions in the immediate years following his death.

pointless endeavors because Ryan White's legacy lives on. He's demonstrated so clearly that everyone who has AIDS or is infected or who has died of it is someone's child and deserves the kind of compassion and sensitivity that we normally give forth to our children. In August 1990, the United States Congress passed the Ryan White Care Act.

It was a major piece of AIDS legislation that provided more than $2 billion to help cities, states, and community-based organizations develop systems of diagnosis and treatment for the infection. That bill has been reauthorized twice since it was originally signed into law.

Today, Ryan White's mother, Jeannie, is still sharing Ryan's story in lectures, on TV shows, and in interviews. She hopes nobody else's child has to experience how cruel some human beings can be when it comes to the unknown. Ryan White's story is a tragic story, but there are thousands exactly like it. In the early 80s, there were approximately 20,000 hemophiliacs in the United States.

Of those 20,000, at least half contracted HIV through blood treatments. Half. 10,000 people sentenced to death. And that doesn't even account for the rest of the world. It was a horrific tragedy, and at least one of the company's responsible saw it coming. There's a paper trail of internal memos and meeting minutes that tracked every corporate move. And how did those suits and ties respond when they found out that there was a problem? Well,

You'll see a multinational pharmaceutical company with a dark past is blamed for one of the worst drug-related disasters in medical history on this episode of Swindled.

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It works wonders when the family gathers at Grandma's for one of those special Sunday dinners. And if you get a headache later on, that's when Bayer works wonders. Two Bayer tablets bring all the pain relief power your headache can use. Bayer is pure aspirin, not just part aspirin. Bayer works wonders.

Bayer AG is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. It's been that way for quite some time. The German-based company is probably best known for introducing aspirin to the headache-plagued public in the late 1800s, but there are far more interesting and unsettling stories to be found in the company's history. For starters, Bayer is also credited with commercializing heroin at the beginning of the 20th century.

the company actually invented the name heroin, sold it over the counter, and promoted it as a cough suppressant. The name is based on a German word that means heroic and strong, words that the German people would hear ad nauseum in the ensuing decades. In 1925, in order to remain competitive, Bayer, along with five other German chemical and pharmaceutical companies, merged into a single conglomerate megacorporation named IG Farben.

and during the 1930s, IG Farben became the single largest financial donor to the political campaign of failed artist Adolf Hitler. Company executives were reportedly hesitant to show support for the Nazis considering many of its key scientists were Jewish, including the man who invented aspirin. But ultimately, it was an investment for the future. An investment that would pay off.

IG Farben became the largest profiteer of German conquest in World War II and grew to be the largest company in all of Europe, the fourth largest company in the world. One of the ways the conglomerate was able to accomplish this was by establishing an oil and rubber plant at the Auschwitz concentration camp to take advantage of slave labor. Tens of thousands of involuntary unpaid employees, a tried and true cost saving measure.

Chemical cells were also on the upswing, specifically Zyklon B, which was manufactured by an IG Farben subsidiary. Zyklon B is the cyanide-based pesticide that was used to exterminate over a million Jews in the gas chambers during the Holocaust. Executives of the company would later claim that they were unaware of what the Nazis were doing with the chemical. They must have assumed that Hitler was fumigating a forest of citrus trees.

Lawsuits filed decades later also accused IG Farben of providing toxic chemicals to Joseph Mengele, the Angel of Death, for use in the Nazis' human experiments.

Mangala would find a set of identical twins and inject chemicals, bacteria, and viruses into one of the two. He'd record the results and compare it with the uninfected brother or sister control group and then share the data with IG Farben for their use in the development of future drugs. Collaboration is key. Though IG Farben would later deny any involvement with Joseph Mangala's grotesque experiments performed at the concentration camps, they must have had better things to do.

like performing grotesque experiments of their own. Correspondence between company officials and concentration camp officers contains discussions about purchasing Jewish prisoners to use them as scientific guinea pigs. A representative for the Bayer group of IG Farben even haggles over the price per head. "We propose to pay no more than 170 Reichsmarks per woman," he writes.

"If this is acceptable to you, the women will be placed in our possession. We need some 150 women." That particular experiment was to test a new anesthetic the company's chemist had developed, and apparently that anesthetic was not ready for market. After delivery, the IG Farben employee wrote back to the Auschwitz customer service representative, quote, "The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition.

However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women, to the same number and at the same price." Other Jewish women that had been purchased by the company were deliberately infected with typhoid, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and a multitude of different diseases. They were then given experimental medications in an attempt to cure or treat them. Research and development, they called it.

according to prisoner physicians who witnessed the experiments. After being injected with the drugs, the women would often experience circulation problems, bloody vomiting, and painful diarrhea that contained, quote, fragments of mucous membrane. Most of them would die in the process. The grave charges in this case have not been laid before the tribunal casually or unreflectingly. The indictment accuses these men of major responsibility...

for visiting upon mankind the most searing and catastrophic war in modern history. When the war ended, 24 of IG Farben's top executives stood trial at the Nuremberg War Criminal Tribunal. U.S. Prosecutor Telford Taylor accused the company of committing the worst of a long list of Nazi atrocities. Quote, These IG Farben criminals, not the lunatic Nazi fanatics, are the main war criminals.

If the guilt of these criminals is not brought to light, and if they are not punished, they will represent a much greater threat to the future peace of the world than Hitler if he were still alive. In July 1948, 10 of the 24 IG Farben executives were acquitted. The others were sentenced to light prison terms for their part in the mass murder, slavery, and crimes against humanity. No sentence was longer than eight years.

and many of those war criminals, once released from prison, had executive level positions waiting for them at the companies IG Farben had been divided into. For example, Fritz Termeer, an IG Farben chemist and manager convicted of war crimes, was elected to the supervisory board of Bayer AG, who were split off on their own again. Neither Bayer nor Fritz Termeer would ever formally apologize for their roles in the Holocaust.

In fact, Fritz Tremier defended his company's enslavement of the Jewish people at his Nuremberg trial. "Forced labor did not inflict any remarkable injury, pain, or suffering on the detainees, particularly since the alternative for these workers would have been death anyway. It wasn't until almost 50 years later, in 1995, that Bayer would acknowledge its Nazi past.

The new CEO of the company apologized for IG Farben's actions when introducing Nobel Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel at a lecture in Pittsburgh for the new heads of Bayer who were not personally involved in the company's criminal behavior during World War II. Selling gas to the Nazis and purchasing human guinea pigs at a wholesale rate was nothing but a distant, disturbing memory.

Besides, there were so many other unfortunate things that had happened in those 50 years since past for which the company should have apologized. By the 1970s, Bayer had grown into a much larger company than IG Farben ever had been. They expanded to new international markets in Western Europe and the United States, and the company began acquiring smaller laboratories to expand its pharmaceutical market share.

smaller laboratories like Cutter Laboratories, famous for the Cutter Incident in April 1955, in which Cutter Labs injected 200,000 children with a new polio vaccine that contained the live polio virus. Failures in the manufacturing and inspection processes of the vaccine led to 40,000 cases of polio in children.

The vaccine was soon abandoned. At least 200 of those children were left in varying degrees of paralysis. At least 10 of those children died. But giving polio to kids is just one of the things that Bayer's newly acquired Cutter Laboratories was good at. Cutter also produced a blood clotting product for hemophiliacs called Factor VIII Concentrate, a heaven-sent miracle drug that could not only stop a hemophiliac's bleeding, it could also end their lives.

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It appeared a year ago in New York's gay community, then in the gay communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Now it's been detected in Haitian refugees. No one knows why. And in heavy drug users, especially in New York City. No one knows why. And in some people with hemophilia, a disease that prevents blood clotting so the patient needs frequent blood transfusions. Why?

On July 16th, 1982, the United States Center for Disease Control reported that three hemophiliacs had acquired the new AIDS virus. Or was it a disease? Or a cancer? No one really knew yet. But the newly infected hemophiliacs was the beginning of an alarming trend. Because until then, the epidemic had been mostly contained in homosexual and drug-using populations. The hemophiliacs were proof that nobody was immune.

Nobody was safe, not even children like Ryan White in Indiana or the Ray brothers in Florida.

Normal little kids with hemophilia who all of a sudden ended up with the stigma and the reality of an AIDS death sentence. Ricky, Robert, and Randy Ray all contracted the virus before they were 8 years old. And just like Ryan White, the Ray brothers and their family experienced extreme bullying at the hands of their neighbors. Once they were infected, the Ray brothers paid a heavy price.

They were barred from school. Their house was burned to the ground. Just like Ryan White, the Ray brothers were exposed to the virus through their blood transfusion treatments. Factor VIII Concentrate, the lifesaver. The only thing that I knew about Factor, that it was this miracle drug that made it easier for hemophiliacs. So we thought it was great and we never questioned it because we didn't know that we could.

That's Louise Ray, the mother of the boys, who like Ryan White's mother had to bury her children far too early. Ricky and Robert Ray died of AIDS at ages 15 and 22 respectively. Randy Ray is still alive and manages his illness with modern medications. Ah yes, modern medicine. The kind that tens of thousands of hemophiliacs around the world trusted with their lives.

It couldn't be possible. Our lives had gotten so much better. We were in control of them, infusing at home. As a matter of fact, our chapters didn't even meet on a regular basis anymore because we didn't need each other the way that we had. And then all of a sudden one day we were told that the very drug that was saving our lives, that had given us this freedom, was now going to take our lives.

In January 1983, managers at Bayer's Cutter Laboratories acknowledged that there was "strong evidence to suggest that HIV is passed on to other people through plasma products, plasma products like the ones Cutter produced."

Some scientists internally at the company always wondered if something like that was possible, if not unavoidable. Considering many of the blood donors Cutter recruited to produce Factor VIII were either prisoners, junkies, poor, gay, or all of the above, every one of them a high-risk demographic for the deadly new virus,

It's not yet been proven, but some doctors suspect that blood banks and plasma centers may be spreading a new and mysterious ailment called AIDS. That is acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Over the last two years, about a thousand Americans have been struck by the ailment, which destroys the body's ability to fight infection. 400 of the victims have died.

The evidence comes from a small but vulnerable segment of the population, the 15 to 20,000 Americans suffering from hemophilia, the shortage of the clotting factor in their blood. Typically, hemophiliacs require frequent injections of a product made from the straw-colored blood plasma drawn from thousands of paid donors.

For now, no one is flatly declaring that the nation's blood supply is in danger. Too little is known about AIDS itself, what it is and how it spreads. But until those questions are answered, other questions will persist among the Americans who depend on the blood of others for their own life and health.

In March of 1983, the evidence that blood products like Factor VIII were responsible for the spread of AIDS among hemophiliacs was piling up, and so were the bodies of the infected. The CDC even issued a warning that the blood products were the primary culprit, but Bayer and Cutter Laboratories disagreed.

Three months later, the company sent a letter to distributors around the world alleging that the AIDS virus had become the focus of a "irrational response" in many countries and that the speculations about transmission through blood products were "unsubstantiated." Bayer and Cutter Laboratories continued to sell Factor VIII.

In fact, Cutter had developed a whole new marketing plan for their hemophilia treatment a month earlier. In May 1983, a competing pharmaceutical company in France began manufacturing a heat-treated version of its product similar to Factor VIII. Early results showed that applying heat to the products killed the AIDS virus and hepatitis and whatever else may be lurking in the Red Sea.

In response, the country of France stopped importing Bayer's unheated version, and that was obviously bad for business. So Cutter Labs plotted a way to keep the customers buying their untreated blood by keeping them in the dark. An internal memo read, quote,

In other words, Cutter and Bayer planned to keep making and selling Factor VIII until they were able to come up with something safer, or until someone with more power told them to stop. Until then, there was no reason to cut the head off the Golden Goose, because Factor VIII was expensive, like $200,000 1980s dollars a year expensive, and it was fairly cheap to manufacture. Cutter Laboratories and Bayer were making a killing.

Add to that $50,000 a year worth of AIDS treatment and it's like the gift that kept on giving, at least for the pharmaceutical companies. For the 10,000 victims in the US, it was a nightmare scenario. Most private insurers at the time had a maximum benefit of $1 million. After that amount was exceeded, one would become a pre-existing condition and would be left to their own devices and dwindling finances, at least until they died.

and as in denial as Bayer and Cutter Laboratories pretended to be about the dangers of their blood products at the time, the hemophiliacs themselves were left with the decision to make: do they stop taking the factor VIII and return to the life of pain that untreated hemophilia ensures, or do they continue with their weekly infusions so that they no longer have to fear bleeding to death on a daily basis

knowing that one tainted injection could transform them into the town leper before ultimately killing them. It puts each of us in a quandary. Is the risk imposed by bleeding more than the risk imposed of the possibility of getting AIDS? And none of us know.

Or was the concern overblown? There was no reason to abandon the lifestyle that Factor VIII afforded hemophiliacs, at least according to Alan Brownstein, then executive director of the National Hemophilia Foundation.

It is extremely important that hemophiliacs continue to use their much-needed blood clotting factor products because the risk of not using it is greater.

than the risk of AIDS itself. The NHF, which is a research and lobbying group for hemophiliacs, sent out a letter to its members minimizing the risk of being infected with AIDS via blood products. And the organization claimed that the CDC did not recommend stopping or changing treatments, which was just not true. Why would the National Hemophilia Foundation

A glaring conflict of interest. Who can a hemophiliac trust if even their own foundation was on the dole? That's a rhetorical question that you already know the answer to.

But, as encouraged, hemophiliacs kept buying the treatment, and Bayer kept selling it, even after the company finally introduced a heat-treated version in February 1984, the last of the four major blood product companies to do so.

Bayer claims that they continued to sell the unsafe version of Factor VIII even after the new AIDS-free version was available, because according to the company, some customers believed the heat-treated version to be less effective. The original version worked so well that many were afraid to change, but according to Cutter Laboratories Company Records, that wasn't the only reason.

The company was locked into several quote "large fixed price contracts" that they wanted to fulfill using the original product because it was cheaper to produce. Lower costs led to a larger margin of profit, and a larger margin of profit leads to a bigger yacht for daddy.

Cutter Laboratories, the nation's leading supplier of the plasma product, has accelerated tests of a pasteurizing process it hopes will kill the unidentified AIDS agent, if it is indeed carried in blood.

The paid donors who provide most of the company's blood products are being asked to voluntarily withdraw if they fit in one of the aid's high-risk groups. There were also figurative warehouses full of unsold non-heated inventory, according to minutes of a Cutter Labs meeting that took place on November 15th, 1984. The company planned to quote, "review international markets again" to determine if more of the original product could be sold.

In other words, if for some reason Cutter wasn't able to continue selling the unsafe product to the hemophiliacs in the United States, legally or otherwise, besides morals and basic human decency, what was stopping them from selling the tainted blood overseas to uninformed patients and doctors? The answer to that question was nothing, apparently. Because that's exactly what Cutter Laboratories and Bayer AG decided to do. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

First, the probable cause of AIDS has been found, a variant of a known human cancer virus. Second, not only has the agent been identified, but a new process has been developed to mass produce this virus. Thirdly, with discovery of both the virus and this new process, we now have a blood test for AIDS. With the blood test, we can identify AIDS victims with essentially 100% certainty.

In early 1985, the Centers for Disease Control announced the development of the first test to screen blood products for AIDS, or what the scientific community was now more commonly referring to as HIV. The test would have been developed sooner, but there had been a lengthy public battle between researchers as to who should be given credit and the financial reward for the discovery of the human retrovirus.

The new test confirmed that heat-treating blood products such as Factor VIII rendered the virus undetectable, proof that the heated treatment was the far safer option. Yet Bayer and Cutter continued to ship the original to places like Japan, China, Argentina, Malaysia, Indonesia, parts of Europe, the Middle East, and more. Places that were not necessarily aware of the risk, nor had access to a screening process of their own.

This is why it is difficult to determine how many cases of HIV resulted from Qatar's international shipments. Records of the new virus weren't being kept in those early days. But reportedly, hemophiliacs had a 90% chance of becoming infected at the time. And more than 5 million units of the potentially tainted product were shipped to those countries in the first three months of 1985 alone. Again, that's more than a year after the safer version was available.

There's no telling how many thousands of people actually died. "Can we, in good faith, continue to ship non-heat treated coagulation products to Japan?" Cutter asked itself in February 1985, according to company records. Apparently so, and everywhere else too. The effects of the company's actions were becoming more clear by the day.

Hemophiliacs in Hong Kong and Taiwan began testing positive for HIV, which led to Cutter's Far East distributor to inquire if the new product was available to sell. The company responded with a promise to send the "better, safer alternative" after stocks of the original were used up.

Bayer later claimed that the delay in shipping the new product to places like Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong was the result of plasma shortages and "procedural requirements" in getting it approved for sale in those countries. But officials for both Taiwan and Hong Kong have denied those claims. The bureaucratic nightmare process that Bayer blames for stalling the rollout of the safer product typically takes about a week, said the assistant director of Hong Kong's health department.

the company only needed to apply for an import license. At some point in May 1985, the United States federal government found out what Bayer and its cutter laboratories was doing, and Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr., the Food and Drug Administration's blood products official, invited the companies to a meeting.

The details of the meeting aren't certain, but Cutter executives later shared that the FDA wanted the dangerous blood products matter to be "quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community, and the public. Much ado about nothing."

It's worse than that. The US government allowed it to happen. The FDA allowed this to happen. And now the government is completely looking the other way. Thousands of innocent hemophiliacs have died from the AIDS virus. And not only they're dying, their family members are dying because they're becoming infected with the disease. This company knew absolutely that they had a problem with the product. They knew that it was infected with AIDS. They dumped it because they wanted to turn this disaster

into a profit. Later that month, an official for Cutter Labs announced that there was no longer a market in the Far East, and the company halted all shipments of the unheated product less than two months later. No fines, no criminal charges, other than a few French doctors who were convicted of negligence for giving the products to their patients.

But in terms of punishment for Bayer, there were only quiet settlements with a handful of victims who were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. Thousands more were out of luck because the three-year statute of limitations to bring suit had expired.

The settlements were paid out of a $300 million compensation fund that Bayer had set up for the hemophiliacs. In total, by 1997, Bayer and three other companies producing similar products had paid out more than $600 million to settle with those infected in the 80s. In 2003, the New York Times reopened The Old Wound.

The newspaper published excerpts from Cutter Labs' internal documents and detailed the company's actions of selling millions of dollars worth of potentially infected blood products overseas after a safer alternative had been made available. Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, the director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group, a man who has spent decades investigating these types of abuses, told the New York Times, quote, "These are the most incriminating internal pharmaceutical industry documents I have ever seen."

Bayer had no choice but to respond. The company's president at the time, Jack Ryan, issued a statement. Part of it read, quote,

Bayer has always behaved responsibly, ethically, and humanely to provide life-saving products for the global hemophilia community. Decisions made nearly two decades ago were based on the best scientific information at the time and were consistent with the regulations in place. They cannot be judged on the information available today. In 2010, there was another settlement between Bayer and hemophiliacs in 22 different countries.

Details are relatively unknown because of the NDAs, but the amount is rumored to be tens of millions of dollars. Hopefully hundreds more were fairly compensated. But hemophiliacs in other countries around the world continue to wait their turn. I think the whole thing has been dealt with in an absolutely appalling manner. This should have been dealt with a long time ago when it happened. Not dragged out this long. These people are already sick.

They're already fighting for their lives and it's being made worse by having to fight for justice. It shouldn't be like that. I don't know, to lose my son was just terrible. And I just hope, upon all hope, that I'm still alive, but a timeless inquiry ends and I can have some closure and move on with however long I've got left of my life.

Since the blood product scandal of the 70s and 80s, synthetic versions and safety testing of the treatments for hemophiliacs have been developed. The risk of becoming infected with a blood-borne disease has been virtually removed. HIV and AIDS has also become entirely treatable, though it remains one of the world's leading causes of death. Since the start of the AIDS epidemic, 74.9 million people have become infected with HIV. 32 million of those people have died.

And even though the condition has become manageable, patients still experience the psychologically damaging bigotry that has existed since day one. The science has evolved, but the stigmatization of the disease is deeply rooted. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I think Bayer AG would be inclined to agree.

According to consumersafety.org, Bayer has faced over 16,000 lawsuits relating to Escher. Alleged side effects include migraines, hair loss, even dangerous pregnancies. Buyer shares plunged earlier by the most in 15 years. Investors weighing the potential costs of a protracted legal battle after newly acquired Monsanto was hit with $289 million in damages. This one claims the weed killer Roundup causes cancer.

The truth about sudden heart attacks, unexplained strokes and massive kidney failures. The truth about thousands of mysterious deaths and about the drug Bayer discovered that was potentially lethal but continued to flood the Australian market with anyway.

Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, a.k.a. Deformer, a.k.a. Skyline Pigeon.

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