Human Guinea Pig: Irish woman seeks truth about vaccines

APRIL DREW,

Irish Voice Reporter

Published Thursday, September 2, 2010, 9:34 AM

Updated Sunday, September 5, 2010, 8:57 AM

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Mari Steed

Mari Steed doesn’t get angry very easily. Her presence has a very calming influence, but when you bring her back 50 years to a harrowing time in a mother-daughter home in Co. Cork she tenses up.

Steed, 50, spoke to the Irish Voice from her home in Levittown, Pennsylvania about intrusive, illegal medical trials that were conducted on her young body as a baby.

Steed says she was used as a human guinea pig for a large medical firm to test and improve vaccines for tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough.

Steed presented her medical files to the Irish Voice as proof. They reveal she received her first injection on December 9, 1960 and another on January 6, 1961. Despite being ill after the third injection on January 7, 1961, she was given her fourth and final shot on February 10, 1961, and a booster shot of polio on October 3, 1961.

Steed was born Mary Fitzgerald to a young Co. Wexford woman by the name of Josephine Fitzgerald in 1960. Because Josephine became pregnant with her daughter out of wedlock she was sent to a mother-daughter orphanage style home to have the baby.

Josephine, now in her sixties and also born out of wedlock, was familiar with such homes. She grew up in them and quickly realized she didn’t want her daughter to have the same sort of upbringing. Instead she nursed, played with and loved young Mary until she was 18-months-old.

Josephine then painstakingly handed over her daughter to an Irish American couple in Pennsylvania who promised to take good care of her.

Steed, now director of technology and new media at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, has no memories of her time in Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork, but she does have the doll her mother made for her and other memorabilia she brought with her on the plane journey from Ireland.

Forty years later, during a search for her birth mother, Steed horrifyingly discovered she was used as a guinea pig on a drug trial.

A young Steed was one of 211 children in the care of the Catholic Church that the Wellcome Foundation (now GlaxoSmithKline) frequented to test a four-in-one drug in the sixties and seventies in Ireland.

In Steed’s case it was between December 1960 and October 1961, when she was between nine and 18-months-old.

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, also known as the Laffoy Commission in Ireland, investigated the drug testing in 2001, but a court order by two doctors involved in the trials put a halt to the probe by 2003.

Steed and her birth mother Josephine both presented evidence to the Laffoy Commission before it was disbanded.

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mamaginnty | Feb 14, 2011, 05:48 PM EST

Well said culchiewoman, Kilbarry feels more pity for the poor old profs, than the children who were used, God only knows how many children actually died because of the trials. If all involved were a 100yrs old, I would still drag them through every court in the land and ask "why me, I am not an animal" good luck to Steed and the others, and I hope you get millions as well. They made millions selling those drugs, after testing them on the children. were tested on the childrenn

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culchiewoman | Sep 09, 2010, 03:15 PM EDT

@Kilbarry1: don't get it, do you? This is not about financial gain or tying up courts...it's about seeking legitimate answers and an apology. Why were vulnerable children still under their mothers' legal care used for these trials, rather than the general population (for whom follow-up could be provided)? And why was the mothers consent not given? You're okay with GSK, the State and Church (and two doddering old professors) just randomly selecting children in a mother-and-baby home for these trials? Damn right, we're starting it again. Worried it might come out of your pocket in the form of taxes? Fear not...we're not seeking money. Why did you even comment if it's 'idiocy'?

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Kilbarry1 | Sep 06, 2010, 02:01 PM EDT

Details of these trials were published in Irish and British medical jornals 50 years ago. Two medical professors now in their 70s and 80s who participated in the trials have been subjected to gross harassment as a result of this hysteria: QUOTE from the Irish Independent on 1st August 2003: "A retired UCD professor who was involved in the conduct of vaccination trials in 1960 and 1961 on 58 children in five institutions run by religious orders yesterday won a SUPREME COURT challenge to an order requiring him to give evidence before the Laffoy Commission regarding those trials. The five-judge court unanimously granted the appeal by Prof Patrick Meenan (86) against a High Court order upholding the Commission's direction to him to give evidence before its Vaccine Trials Division." QUOTE from the Irish Independent on 12 June 2004: THE Government's order directing an inquiry into the conduct of vaccine trials on children in State institutions was deemed invalid by the HIGH COURT yesterday. The inquiry was to be held under the aegis of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. Mr Justice Aindrias O Caoimh gave his decision in a challenge brought by retired professor of microbiology Irene Hillary. Professor Hillary worked for 33 years at UCD and participated in tests relating to the method of administration of vaccines in a number of State institutions in the 1960s." This idiocy has resulted in a huge waste of time and money and - no doubt - delays to really important legal cases. And now this lady wants to start it all again!

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Barbaracvm | Sep 06, 2010, 11:55 AM EDT

The oral polio is a live virus vaccine. The Salk polio vaccine is dead virus. The Salk has never been known to give anyone polio. The oral vaccine has documented polio victims from receiving the live virus. Yet the doctors and other medical organizations push the live virus vaccine. I had to fight to get the Salk vaccine for my children. I have been cussed out and yelled at, by nurses, for using the Salk vaccine.

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