Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am sorry. I am quoting the then director of the health protection surveillance centre, Dr. Darina O'Flanagan, who stated there was a 13-fold higher risk of narcolepsy in the vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated. We all know pharmaceutical companies around the world have a great deal of money. I have a British Medical Journal article in front of me on the futility of pharma vigilance if it is not acted upon. The information was coming in. GSK would not provide the product without the agency indemnifying it because it did not know. When we got it in November 2009, or whenever it was, and started to vaccinate, information was coming from GSK to this State within two months telling us it was noting side effects. That was up to 2012. That is not Marc MacSharry or somebody who has an axe to grind to facilitate the payment of State funds to 80 families who is saying that. Dr. Darina O'Flanagan said there was a 13-fold higher risk of narcolepsy in vaccinated compared with unvaccinated.

If we are looking for an angle legally just to get out the gap, I would say we would find it, but if the then Minister, former Deputy and now Senator Reilly, meant what he said back in the day, we should focus on the people affected and their families. The agency does a great job in ensuring the minimum possible payout or whatever in the interests of the State, and I accept the State cannot be seen as a soft touch, but we are not talking about fraudulent whiplash claims here. We are talking about real people with real issues about whom we are superficially saying that we care about the families and we are compassionate. The reality is that we do not because we are tying them up in the discovery process. Did the discovery process take as long for the cervical cancer cases? Absolutely not. Nobody is hanging around two years for that issue to be resolved because it was all over the newspapers and television programmes. This issue was not.