Replies

1989

The Committee of Ten Thousand -- named for the estimated 10,000 Americans infected with HIV by the blood industry -- is formed. Writing in POZ seven years later, COTT's president Corey Dubin says, "For years the manufacturers of blood products and the regulators at the FDA persuaded the hemophilia community as well as the general public that their infections were a 'tragic yet unavoidable mistake.' We now know that this is absolutely not the case and that doing business as usual from 1982 to 1985 consigned thousands of people with hemophilia to the ravages of AIDS. ~~~ Internal drug company memos demonstrate that officials understood the impact that blood tainted by this pathogen could have on people with hemophilia as early as mid-1982, but they failed to warn either our doctors or us. The industry was also targeting for plasma collection groups with a high incidence of hepatitis B -- gay men and prisoners -- that the CDC had by then identified as likely to have AIDS."

MAY 1993

Two separate tainted blood probes -- one by a California investigator and another by the Canadian government -- lead to the door of the Arkansas governor's office, now occupied by Jim Guy Tucker. Both are informed that all the governor's papers were removed when he left office and that they should contact the White House legal counsel's office. What happens next is not known but presumably they make contact with Vince Foster, the man in the legal counsel's office who knew Arkansas and who had been involved in the prison system and who may, at one point, have represented HMA.