Rerun: The Treatment (Bayer AG)

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Speaker 8 You've had a very front-row seat to prejudice, haven't you?

Speaker 10 Very much so.

Speaker 8 Tell me something about that.

Speaker 10 In my case, it was fear and just because, you know, I supposedly had something in my body that nobody else had or very few people had.

Speaker 10 And I think I just, it's because you're different.

Speaker 10 I mean,

Speaker 10 I mean, I'm surprised we really have dogs nowadays because they're different.

Speaker 10 It's amazing how, you know, you can accept a dog into your house, but you can't accept someone because of their race, you know, their color, or their religion, or what they have in them.

Speaker 11 Ryan White wasn't like the other kids. That much became apparent on his first day of life, December 6th, 1971.

Speaker 11 When Ryan was circumcised as a newborn baby, he could not stop bleeding.

Speaker 11 The doctors ran some tests, and a few days later, Ryan White was diagnosed with hemophilia, a hereditary disorder that prevents blood from clotting.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 13 Today, we know hemophilia is caused by an inactive or inadequate supply of certain blood clotting proteins. Most often, it's hereditary, passed from mother to son.

Speaker 13 But in a third of all cases, there is no family history. Haemophilia can strike out of the blue.

Speaker 11 There is no cure. Haemophilia was something that Ryan White and his family would have to learn to manage.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 This weekly infusion contained the ingredient that hemophiliacs lacked for sufficient clotting. Factor VIII could stop bleeding or prevent it from even starting.

Speaker 11 This treatment had become increasingly common among hemophiliacs during the 1970s. It had given those afflicted an entirely new lease on life.

Speaker 11 Before Factor VIII, hemophiliacs existed in a state of constant pain and emergency room visits.

Speaker 11 They were often relegated to crutches, wheelchairs, and lengthy hospital stays when the bleeding would occur.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 14 Some people with haemophilia would have to go to an emergency room, probably wait several hours in order to get an infusion of blood, frequently whole blood, sometimes plasma.

Speaker 14 In the meantime, they would wait, they'd have a painful joint bleed or something like that. So it was very inconvenient, very inefficient.

Speaker 14 Many times they would just stay at home and suffer through the pain.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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 1200.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 He had developed acquired immune deficiency syndrome, more commonly referred to as AIDS.

Speaker 11 This is Ryan's mother, Jeannie.

Speaker 16 From the very first, you know, he asked me, am I going to die?

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 11 Little was known about HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s when the mysterious illness was quickly growing to epidemic proportions.

Speaker 11 Experts couldn't quite yet explain what was causing some people's immune systems to stop functioning, but there were some trends emerging.

Speaker 11 Medical professionals had found that the virus was spreading mainly throughout four different groups of people. One, homosexuals, two, intravenous drug users, three, Haitians, and four, hemophiliacs.

Speaker 11 Haemophiliacs like Ryan White

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 In fact, the tests for the virus didn't even exist at the time.

Speaker 11 And it only took one infected donor out of the poll 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.

Speaker 17 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 it at the time.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 18 When Ryan was diagnosed, they only gave him three to six months to live. So at that time, I thought every cough, every fever, I was worried about whether it was going to be the last.

Speaker 18 And I really didn't think he'd ever be healthy enough to go to school. But as he started getting healthy and he started gaining his weight, he started asking mom.

Speaker 18 He said, Mom, he said, I want to go to school. He said, I want to go visit my friends.
I want to see my friends.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 HIV is transmitted through bodily fluids, so Ryan White posed very little risk to the students, faculty, and parents of Western Middle School in Russiaville, Indiana.

Speaker 11 But the students, faculty, and parents of Western Middle School disagreed and were not very welcoming.

Speaker 19 I don't think he should be here. If people with chicken pox and measles can't come, why should he?

Speaker 20 There's been a lot of rumors that

Speaker 20 when he gets mad, he splits on people. people.

Speaker 15 You guarantee that my daughter will not get aged by helping.

Speaker 15 If you can't, then he shouldn't be in school.

Speaker 19 I don't want to take the chance of my child being right next to him and maybe accidentally being sneezed on.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Ryan's formal request to attend school in in person was denied by the superintendent.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 10 I don't want nobody else to get it, and I can see where they're worried.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But the battle dragged on for months, and the longer it took, the uglier it got.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 It is God's punishment, they would whisper behind her back. Retribution for being gay.

Speaker 17 It was really bad. It was, um,

Speaker 13 people were really cruel.

Speaker 21 People said he had to be gay.

Speaker 11 He had to to 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.

Speaker 11 Ryan White had never felt so alone, but he fought valiantly.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Ryan did his best to destigmatize living with HIV. He was the innocent, white, suburban face that hit closer to home for a lot of people in middle America.

Speaker 10 You know, I can't blame him for being scared because it was new to everybody at the time.

Speaker 10 And,

Speaker 10 you know, when you don't know about something, you're going to be afraid of it.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 22 Well, they marked my folders,

Speaker 22 They marked it fag and other cruel things.

Speaker 23 I was talking about, you know, they accused you of, what, spitting on the vegetables or something?

Speaker 22 Yeah, spitting on vegetables and taking bites out of cookies and putting them back.

Speaker 23 Why would people do that? Just

Speaker 23 to be spiteful or because they're scared?

Speaker 22 Well, I thought they were scared first and foremost, and it just led to where,

Speaker 22 you know, their fear just took control of them, and they just believed what they wanted to believe.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Ryan also liked the school that welcomed him as one of their own. They weren't afraid to shake his hand.

Speaker 11 And Ryan White had been shaking a lot of hands in the late 80s.

Speaker 11 His legal battle with the school system made national headlines and magazine covers and caught the attention of A-list celebrities like Elton John.

Speaker 25 Ryan White is an example of probably the most tremendous courage and tremendous dignity that

Speaker 25 a young person could have possibly shown in his life after he

Speaker 25 shown such bigotry and such abuse.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Nice going, Ron.

Speaker 11 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 re-emerged with a vengeance in early 1990.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 4 Seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind.

Speaker 8 Ryan is getting plenty of moral support. Elk John, who Ryan met in an AIDS fundraiser, came to visit.
Michael Jackson, Johnny Cash, Joe Montana, Call. Hundreds have sent cars, telegrams, flowers.

Speaker 11 Ryan White died on April 8th, 1990, five years later than originally predicted, and one month before his high school graduation.

Speaker 20 This nation lost one of its leading figures in the battle against AIDS. 18-year-old Ryan White has died of the disease.

Speaker 20 President Bush said all Americans were touched by his courage, strength, and ability to continue fighting.

Speaker 20 Turn it loose

Speaker 20 from your hands

Speaker 11 There was standing room only at Ryan White's funeral.

Speaker 11 More than 1,500 people attended, including Ryan's buddies Michael Jackson and Elton John, the latter of whom played a song dedicated to Ryan called Skyline Pigeon.

Speaker 11 There's a six-foot eight-inch gravestone at the Cesario Cemetery that marks Ryan's final resting place.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 11 In August 1990, the United States Congress passed the Ryan White Care Act.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 That bill has been reauthorized twice since it was originally signed into law.

Speaker 11 Today, Ryan White's mother, Jeannie, is still sharing Ryan's story in lectures, on TV shows, and in interviews.

Speaker 11 She hopes nobody else's child has to experience how cruel some human beings can be when it comes to the unknown.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 and at least one of the companies responsible saw it coming. There's a paper trail of internal memos and meeting minutes that tracked every corporate move.

Speaker 11 And how did those suits and ties respond when they found out that there was a problem?

Speaker 11 Well, you'll see.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 4 They bribed government officials to find accounting career violations of decades state law earlier in the unethical pay

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Speaker 29 The drums that do.

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Speaker 29 That's a good suit. 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.

Speaker 29 Bayer is pure aspirin, not just part aspirin. Bayer works wonders.

Speaker 11 Bayer AG is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. It's been that way for quite some time.

Speaker 11 The German-based company is probably best known for introducing aspirin to the headache-plagued public in the late 1800s.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 words that the German people would hear ad nauseum in the ensuing decades.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And during the 1930s, IG Farben became the single largest financial donor to the political campaign of failed artist Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But ultimately, it was an investment for the future, an investment that would pay off.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Tens of thousands of involuntary unpaid employees, a tried and true cost-saving measure.

Speaker 11 Chemical cells were also on the upswing, specifically Zyklon B, which was manufactured by an IG Farben subsidiary.

Speaker 11 Zyklon B is the cyanide-based pesticide that was used to exterminate over a million Jews in the gas chambers during the Holocaust.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Lawsuits filed decades later also accused I.G. Farben of providing toxic chemicals to Joseph Mangela, the angel of death, for use in the Nazis' human experiments.

Speaker 11 Mangela would find a set of identical twins and inject chemicals, bacteria, and viruses into one of the two.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Collaboration is key.

Speaker 11 Though IG Farben would later deny any involvement with Joseph Mengele's grotesque experiments performed at the concentration camps, they must have had better things to do, like performing grotesque experiments of their own.

Speaker 11 Correspondence between company officials and concentration camp officers contains discussions about purchasing Jewish prisoners to use them as scientific guinea pigs.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 If this is acceptable to you, the women will be placed in our possession. We need some 150 women.

Speaker 11 That particular experiment was to test a new anesthetic the company's chemist had developed, and apparently that anesthetic was not ready for market.

Speaker 11 After delivery, the IG Farben employee wrote back to the Auschwitz customer service representative: quote, the transport of 150 women arrived in good condition.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Other Jewish women that had been purchased by the company were deliberately infected with typhoid, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and a multitude of different diseases.

Speaker 11 They were then given experimental medications in an attempt to cure or treat them. Research and development, they called it.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Most of them would die in the process.

Speaker 26 The grave charges in this case

Speaker 26 have not been laid before the tribunal casually or unreflectingly.

Speaker 26 The indictment accuses these men of major responsibility

Speaker 26 for visiting upon mankind the most searing and catastrophic war in modern history.

Speaker 11 When the war ended, 24 of I.G. Farben's top executives stood trial.
at the Nuremberg War Criminal Tribunal. U.S.

Speaker 11 Prosecutor Telford Taylor Taylor accused the company of committing the worst of a long list of Nazi atrocities.

Speaker 11 Quote, These IG Farben criminals, not the lunatic Nazi fanatics, are the main war criminals.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 No sentence was longer than eight years.

Speaker 11 And many of those war criminals, once released from prison, had executive-level positions waiting for them at the company's IG Farben had been divided into.

Speaker 11 For example, Fritz Termier, 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.

Speaker 11 Neither Bayer nor Fritz Turmeer would ever formally apologize for their roles in the Holocaust. In fact, Fritz Turmeer defended his company's enslavement of the Jewish people at his Nuremberg trial.

Speaker 11 Quote: 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.

Speaker 11 It wasn't until almost 50 years later, in 1995, that Bayer would acknowledge its Nazi past.

Speaker 11 The new CEO of the company apologized for I.G. Farben's actions when introducing Nobel Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor L.E.
Biesel at a lecture in Pittsburgh.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Besides, there were so many other unfortunate things that had happened in those 50 years since past for which the company should have apologized.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 and the company began acquiring smaller laboratories to expand its pharmaceutical market share.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Failures in the manufacturing and inspection processes of the vaccine led to 40,000 cases of polio in children. The vaccine was soon abandoned.

Speaker 11 At least 200 of those children were left in varying degrees of paralysis. At least 10 of those children died.

Speaker 11 But giving polio to kids is just one of the things that Bayer's newly acquired Cutter Laboratories was good at.

Speaker 11 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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Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And in heavy drug users, especially in New York City. No one knows why.

Speaker 32 And in some people with hemophilia, a disease that prevents blood clotting, so the patient needs frequent blood transfusions.

Speaker 33 Why?

Speaker 11 On July 16, 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 The hemophiliacs were proof that nobody was immune.

Speaker 9 It's mysterious, it's deadly, and it's baffling medical science. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Speaker 9 Once thought to affect only promiscuous homosexual males, AIDS is now spreading in epidemic proportions to other segments of the population.

Speaker 11 Nobody was safe. Not even children like Ryan White in Indiana or the Ray brothers in Florida.

Speaker 11 Normal little kids with hemophilia who all of a sudden ended up with the stigma and the reality of an AIDS death sentence.

Speaker 11 Ricky, Robert, and Randy Ray all contracted the virus before they were eight years old.

Speaker 11 And just like Ryan White, The Ray brothers and their family experienced extreme bullying at the hands of their neighbors.

Speaker 15 Once they were infected, the Ray brothers paid a heavy price. They were barred from school.
Their house was burned to the ground.

Speaker 11 Just like Ryan White, the Ray brothers were exposed to the virus through their blood transfusion treatments. Factor VIII Concentrate, the lifesaver.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 35 It couldn't be possible our lives had gotten so much better. We were in control of them,

Speaker 35 infusing at home.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 11 In January 1983, managers at Bayer's Cutter Laboratories acknowledged that there was, quote, strong evidence to suggest that HIV is passed on to other people through plasma products.

Speaker 11 Plasma products like the ones Cutter produced. Some scientists internally at the company always wondered if something like that was possible, if not unavoidable.

Speaker 11 Considering many of the blood donors Cutter recruited to produce Factory VIII were either prisoners, junkies, poor, gay, or all of the above.

Speaker 11 Every one of them a high-risk demographic for the deadly new virus.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 Typically, hemophiliacs require frequent injections of a product made from the straw-colored blood plasma drawn from thousands of paid donors.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 But until those questions are answered, other questions will persist among the Americans who who depend on the blood of others for their own life and health.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 The CDC even issued a warning that the blood products were the primary culprit. But Bayer and Cutter Laboratories disagreed.

Speaker 11 Three months later, the company sent a letter to distributors around the world, alleging that the AIDS virus had become the focus of a, quote, irrational response in many countries, and that the speculations about transmission through blood products were, quote, unsubstantiated.

Speaker 11 Bayer and Qatar Laboratories continued to sell Factor VIII.

Speaker 11 In fact, Qatar had developed a whole new marketing plan for their hemophilia treatment a month earlier.

Speaker 11 In May 1983, A competing pharmaceutical company in France began manufacturing a heat-treated version of its product similar to Factor VIII.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 In response, the country of France stopped importing Bayer's unheated version, and that was obviously bad for business.

Speaker 11 So Cutter Labs plotted a way to keep the customers buying their untreated blood by keeping them in the dark.

Speaker 11 An internal memo read, quote, We want to give the impression that we are continuously improving our product without telling them we expect soon to also have a heat-treated concentrate.

Speaker 11 In other words, Cutter and Bayer planned to keep making and selling Factor 8 until they were able to come up with something safer, or until someone with more power told them to stop.

Speaker 11 Until then, there was no reason to cut the head off the golden goose.

Speaker 11 Because Factor 8 was expensive, like $200,198

Speaker 11 a year expensive, and it was fairly cheap to manufacture. Cutter Laboratories and Bayer were making a killing.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 For the 10,000 victims in the U.S., it was a nightmare scenario. Most private insurers at the time had a maximum benefit of $1 million.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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 a decision to make.

Speaker 11 Do they stop taking the Factor VIII and return to the life of pain that untreated hemophilia ensures?

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 37 It puts each of us in a quandary.

Speaker 37 You know,

Speaker 37 is the risk imposed by bleeding more than the risk imposed of the possibility of getting AIDS? And none of us know.

Speaker 27 I really don't have an option.

Speaker 38 I have to continue using the plasma or the concentrate as it's called. The thought of abandoning the kind of life that I have as a result of the concentrate is almost unthinkable.

Speaker 11 Or was the concern overblown?

Speaker 11 There was no reason to abandon the lifestyle that Factor 8 afforded hemophiliacs, at least according to Alan Brownstein, then executive director of the National Haemophilia Foundation.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And the organization claimed that the CDC did not recommend stopping or changing treatments, which was just not true.

Speaker 15 Why would the National Haemophilia Foundation side with the pharmaceutical companies in an issue that it knew was killing its very own people?

Speaker 15 Because it got a substantial amount of its income from the pharmaceutical companies.

Speaker 11 A glaring conflict of interest.

Speaker 11 Who can a hemophiliac trust if even their own foundation was on the dole?

Speaker 11 That's a rhetorical question that you already know the answer to.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 the last of the four major blood product companies to do so.

Speaker 11 Bayer claims that they continued to sell the unsafe version of of Factor 8 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Lower costs led to a larger margin of profit, and a larger margin of profit leads to a bigger yacht for Daddy.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 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 AIDS high-risk groups.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 The company planned to, quote, review international markets again to determine if more of the original product could be sold.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 11 The answer to that question was nothing, apparently, because that's exactly what Cutter Laboratories and Bayer AG decided to do.

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Speaker 39 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 39 First,

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 11 In early 1985, the Centers for Disease Control announced the development of the first test to screen blood products for AIDS.

Speaker 11 or what the scientific community was now more commonly referring to as HIV.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Yet Bayer and Cutter continued to ship the original to places like Japan, China, Argentina, Malaysia, Indonesia, parts of Europe, the the Middle East, and more.

Speaker 11 Places that were not necessarily aware of the risk, nor had access to a screening process of their own.

Speaker 11 This is why it is difficult to determine how many cases of HIV resulted from Qatar's international shipments.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 and more than 5 million units of the potentially tainted product were shipped to those countries in the first three months months of 1985 alone.

Speaker 11 Again, that's more than a year after the safer version was available. There's no telling how many thousands of people actually died.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 The effects of the company's actions were becoming more clear by the day.

Speaker 11 Haemophiliacs 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.

Speaker 11 The company responded with a promise to send the, quote, better, safer alternative after stocks of the original were used up.

Speaker 11 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 quote, procedural requirements in getting it approved for sale in those countries.

Speaker 11 But officials for both Taiwan and Hong Kong have denied those claims.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 The company only needed to apply for an import license.

Speaker 11 At some point in May 1985, the United States federal government found out what Bayer and its Qatar laboratories was doing. And Dr.
Harry M.

Speaker 11 Meyer Jr., the Food and Drug Administration's blood products official, invited the companies to a meeting.

Speaker 11 The details of the meeting aren't certain, but Qatar executives later shared that the FDA wanted the dangerous blood products matter to be, quote, quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community, and the public.

Speaker 11 Much ado about nothing.

Speaker 24 It's worse than that. The U.S.
government allowed it to happen. The FDA allowed this to happen.
And now the government is completely looking the other way.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 No fines, no criminal charges, other than a few French doctors who were convicted of negligence for giving the products to their patients.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Thousands more were out of luck because the three-year statute of limitations to bring suit had expired.

Speaker 11 The settlements were paid out of a $300 million compensation fund that Bayer had set up for the hemophiliacs.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 In 2003, the New York Times reopened the old wound.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Dr. Sidney M.

Speaker 11 Wolf, 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.

Speaker 11 Bayer had no choice but to respond. The company's president at the time, Jack Ryan, issued a statement.
Part of it read:

Speaker 11 Bayer has always behaved responsibly, ethically, and humanely to provide life-saving products for the global hemophilia community.

Speaker 11 Decisions made nearly two decades ago were based on the best scientific information of the time and were consistent with the regulations in place.

Speaker 11 They cannot be judged on the information available today.

Speaker 11 In 2010, there was another settlement between Bayer and hemophiliacs in 22 different countries.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But hemophiliacs in other countries around the world continue to wait their turn.

Speaker 40 I think the whole thing has been dealt with in an absolutely appalling manner.

Speaker 40 This should have been dealt with a long time ago

Speaker 40 when it happened.

Speaker 40 Not dragged out this long.

Speaker 40 These people are already sick.

Speaker 40 They're already fighting for their lives, and it's being made worse by having to fight for justice.

Speaker 40 It shouldn't be like that.

Speaker 41 I don't know, to lose my son

Speaker 4 was just

Speaker 11 terrible.

Speaker 41 And I just hope, hope, upon all hope, that I'm still alive, that a timeless inquiry ends and I can have some closure and move on with however long I've got left of my life.

Speaker 11 Since the blood product scandal of the 70s and 80s, synthetic versions and safety testing of the treatments for hemophiliacs have been developed.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Since the start of the AIDS epidemic, 74.9 million people have become infected with HIV. 32 million of those people have died.

Speaker 11 And even though the condition has become manageable, Patients still experience the psychologically damaging bigotry that has existed since day one.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 30 According to consumersafety.org, Bayer has faced over 16,000 lawsuits relating to e-sure.

Speaker 42 Alleged side effects include migraines, hair loss, even dangerous pregnancies.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 This one claims the weed killer Roundup causes cancer.

Speaker 43 The truth about sudden heart attacks, unexplained strokes, and massive kidney failures.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 11 Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, aka Deformer, aka Skyline Pigeon.

Speaker 11 For more information about Swindled, you can visit swindledpodcast.com and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Swindled Podcast. Or you can send us a postcard at P.O.

Speaker 11 Box6044, Austin, Texas, 78762. But please, no packages.
We do not trust you.

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Speaker 11 Oh, and stay tuned after the voicemails to hear a promo for a new podcast called One Strange Thing. I think you'll dig it.
See ya.

Speaker 23 My name is Keely from Portland, Oregon. My name is Laura Velasa from Portugal.

Speaker 44 My name is Gloria Colombraña from Puerto Rico and I'm a current resident.

Speaker 45 Everyone enjoys a little mystery. And on the new podcast, One Strange Thing, that's just what you'll get.
I'm host Laura Norton. Join me every other week.

Speaker 45 to explore forgotten stories from America's news archives that have something in common. A single element that can't quite be explained.
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

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