The voices of those affected by the infected blood tragedy were silenced for too long

This week the UK bears witness to an important milestone in the history of the NHS: the final report of the infected blood inquiry. The report details how tens of thousands of people across the UK were infected by the NHS with HIV, hepatitis, and other bloodborne infections from the 1970s to the 1990s. One starts to wonder how a system built to serve and protect the health of the British population went so wrong, and how far it has come since then.I served as one of six members of the infected blood inquiry health economics expert advisory group, charged with estimating how much this disaster has cost the UK public. Based on our crude estimates the number sits somewhere between £2bn and £4bn, as of 2021 when our data ended.1 These estimates cannot come close to a true representation of the lifelong costs of being infected with a chronic…
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