Four decades after leaving her mother and baby home in Bork, Cork, Ireland, Mari Steed made a horrific discovery. While there as a baby, she was part of what she calls a ‘highly unethical’ vaccination trial.
From 5 months old, Steed has been vaccinated at least three times with an experimental shot to prevent diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and polio, her medical records, which she shared with NBC News, have revealed. Steed, now 60, later learned that the vaccine had been given without the knowledge of her mother, who had lived in Bessborough for the first 18 months of her life.
At least dozens of other children at mother and baby homes – the since-closed church institutions in Ireland for unmarried women and their children – were allegedly involved in such trials during the same period. Like Steed, others who reunited with their birth mothers learned that there was also no parental consent for their participation.
‘Scientifically, I understand that there is no more perfect research group than a group of imprisoned children. But it requires enormous ethical protocols, and it just has not been followed, ‘said Steed, who was adopted by an American family from Bessborough. “Whether it was out of sheer ignorance or ‘we do not give a shit about what happens to the children’ – it still makes me angry. “
The Irish Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters will release a long-awaited report on Tuesday on various abuses in the homes. The report is expected to include details on the vaccine trials that will be shared for the first time with survivors, their families and the public.
The homes were the subject of a years-long investigation into the discovery of an unmarked mass grave in 2014 at another Irish mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway, where nearly 800 children died from 1925 to 1961.
Six interim reports from the commission have been released. In it, the commission concluded that many of the children died of malnutrition and other preventable diseases; sometimes their bodies were sent to universities for anatomical studies.
The final report, especially any details on the vaccination of experiments, is ‘long overdue’, Steed said. He currently resides in Ruther Glen, Virginia, and works after a day spa in banking and academia. She made it her life’s work to shine a light on the inhuman practices suffered by Irish unmarried women and their children.
Steed hopes that anyone still alive who was involved in the vaccine trial, including researchers, pharmaceutical workers or the nuns who ran Bessborough, will be held accountable.
According to them, they say that the inhabitants of the houses are ‘less than the rest of society’, which has left many survivors, like her, with lasting emotional scars.
“In Ireland at the time, it was just acceptable,” Steed said. ‘If you were an unmarried woman or a child who was the result of an extramarital affair, you were’ different ‘, because that’s what the church taught people to do. “
The vaccine she received was manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome, a pharmaceutical company that later merged with GlaxoSmithKline. Steed confirmed in 2011 through a freedom of information with GlaxoSmithKline that she had received the shot; she shared the confirmation she received with NBC News.
A nation faces its shameful past
Steed found out she was on trial when she began searching for her medical records in the 1990s.
According to records, she received her last shot shortly before she was sent to her adoptive family in Philadelphia in late 1961. The family had no idea she was in the vaccine trial, she said.
GlaxoSmithKline declined to comment on individual records and declined to comment on the investigation prior to the release of the report, but said in a statement to NBC News that it had ‘cooperated fully with the Commission and provided copies of relevant documents. from his historical archives. ‘
Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the Roman Catholic order run by the Bessborough mother and baby, also worked with the commission to convey information. They declined to comment on the individual allegations.
As for the vaccine test, the sisters said in an email to NBC News that they “have no information to substantiate the claim in your query.”
Steed does not believe she had any physical consequences from the trial she endured. In 2014, a doctor who supervised mother and baby homes claimed that the vaccines did not harm any children involved; NBC News could not confirm the claim.
The allegations about the houses run by nuns gave a deeply Catholic country deep shame. Although the commission does not have the power to award financial compensation to victims or their families, many hope that the Irish government will take action.
“The first step of the government should be to give individuals access to their own information,” said Maeve O’Rourke, a lecturer in human rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and co-director of the Clann project. , a pro bono initiative that gathered evidence for the commission and pleaded on behalf of the mothers and their children.
‘People have the right to the truth – the right to know who they are, what happened to them, and what became of their missing relatives. “This is the absolute basic requirement that the government must meet before any other correction can have meaning or sincerity,” she said.
The commission focused on the history of 14 mother and baby homes and four county houses in Ireland from 1922 to 1998. Everything was closed before the start of the investigation.
Steed said she feels she is a “guinea pig” and is furious because her mother, Josephine Bassett, was never told about the trial.
Bassett was born at the age of 26. When Steed reunited with Bassett in 2002, Bassett told her she was forced to choose adoption – but begged the nuns to send her daughter to an American family so there was less chance Steed would be on the verge of Irishness. society as she had. Steed and Bassett had a close relationship until Bassett’s death in 2013.
It is unclear whether any of the commission’s interim reports led to charges. Steed hopes Tuesday’s final report will be able to do that.
“If there are living people who can be held accountable for crimes, I hope that they are appropriately prosecuted, punished and that they cannot get away with this again because they are nuns or priests or government members,” she said.