If the history of drug scandals teaches us anything, it is that fair compensation is typically achieved only through lengthy media campaigns and legal battles. Though lacking the direct powers of judges or policymakers, interventions by investigative journalists and broadcasters have sometimes proved decisive.
Take thalidomide: between 1957 and 1961 the widely prescribed morning-sickness treatment caused miscarriages, and many thousands of babies around the world were born with severe limb malformations. In the UK, an adequate settlement was negotiated with the British distributor, Distillers Company (now part of Diageo), only after the Sunday Times took up the cause in 1972.
The thalidomide disaster is the best-known drug scandal involving birth defects, but it is not the only one. In the late 1960s, suspicion fell on Primodos, a hormonal pregnancy-test drug marketed by the German pharmaceutical company Schering (now Bayer). I have previously written on the origins of Primodos and the still unresolved debate over whether the British government should have allowed it to remain on the market until 1978, despite widespread safety concerns and the existence of a highly reliable and perfectly harmless alternative: the laboratory urine test. As with thalidomide, the media played and continues to play a crucial role in the campaign for compensation for those who say they have been harmed by Primodos.
Blowing the whistle on Schering
The Primodos scandal unfolded in the shadow of the thalidomide disaster and was shaped by it. Primed by thalidomide, the Sunday Times became involved early on. It was in response to a Sunday Times exposé that the British government issued the first official warning of a ‘possible association’ between Primodos and ‘an increased incidence of congenital abnormalities’ in 1975. Despite the warning many doctors continued to prescribe Primodos, and it remained widely available in Britain.
The media campaign took a dramatic turn in 1977 when a concerned employee of Schering’s British subsidiary leaked internal corporate documents to the press. These papers revealed a significant dispute between British and German executives over whether Primodos should continue to be marketed in Britain. Essentially, British executives wanted the drug to be taken off the market, but their hands were tied when the final decision was made in Berlin. The documents eventually reached the light of day by a circuitous route, involving a whistle-blower, a reporter, and a private investigator.
Scandal, leaks and spin
Ian Withers, a private investigator, was enlisted by a law firm to place the documents with one of the national newspapers. Withers was offered a fee of £500 and asked to generate £10,000 for the large folder of correspondence. This sum was intended as an insurance policy for the anonymous ‘whistleblower’, who fully expected to lose his job and forfeit any further career prospects in the industry. Withers spent around ten days hawking sample pages to journalists and media contacts. One was a reporter for the Sunday People, who expressed an interest in the story. But instead of exposing Schering’s internal dispute over drug safety, the reporter decided to portray Withers as a ‘rat’ trying to ‘cash in on a toddler’s suffering’. Withers considered suing, but refrained in order to safeguard his client’s anonymity, which endures to this day. Happily, the incident did not damage the detective’s reputation and he went on to a career as one of Britain’s most successful private eyes.
The leaked folder, meanwhile, soon made its way into the hands of journalist and broadcaster Greg Dyke, who quoted heavily from the documents it contained in his hour-long documentary for London Weekend Television’s The London Programme in 1978. By then, Labour MP Jack Ashley, who had spearheaded the thalidomide campaign in Parliament, had begun calling for a government inquiry into Primodos. Further coverage in The Guardian and The Sunday Times continued to apply pressure and culminated in a first debate, in the House of Commons, on 26 May 1978.
On 6 June 1978, Dyke reported in The Guardian that Health Minister Roland Moyle would that day ‘for the first time, come face to face with a group of parents who believe their children were born deformed because their mothers were prescribed hormone pregnancy testing drugs’. The parents, Dyke explained, wanted ‘just one thing from the Minister – a public inquiry into the way the drugs were used in this country’. But despite Ashley’s efforts, the parents did not receive the inquiry they wanted—until 2014.
New lines of evidence
The current inquiry, set to report in May, was launched by the Department of Health following a second debate in the Commons, on 23 October 2014. Its brief is to examine the evidence, including new sources that were not available in the 1970s. These include thousands of pages of documents that have resurfaced in London and Berlin and ongoing laboratory research on the effects of Primodos on developing fish embryos. A reenergised campaign, headed by Marie Lyon, now has the support of an all-party parliamentary group formed in 2014 by Labour MP Yasmin Qureshi. And Jason Farrell, a Sky News reporter who became involved in 2011, has made Primodos: The Secret Drug Scandal, an hour-long documentary and the culmination of his investigation.
Back in 1978, Dyke had access to just a single leaked folder of internal correspondence. Today, the evidence base is radically expanded to include new experimental results and masses of previously supressed documents. Farrell makes good use of these, as should the inquiry, which has vastly more material at its disposal than it would have done in the late 1970s. It is possible that legal proceedings, abandoned in 1982, will be started up again. The media, alongside campaigners and MPs, continues to play as vital a role as it did back then. It does so by bringing new evidence to light, using it to form public opinion, and, not least, by applying pressure to government and industry. Will today’s media campaign, armed with new lines of evidence, succeed where that of the 1970s faltered? Will Primodos: The Secret Drug Scandal make history?
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn is a historian of medicine at the University of Cambridge. He acted as historical consultant on Primodos: The Secret Drug Scandal.
