Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Blood on Their Hands
WORK NOTES: with Eric Weinberg
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1951
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Shaw * https://english.tcnj.edu/faculty-staff/donna-shaw/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1951.
EDUCATION:Pennsylvania State University, B.A.; Columbia University, M.S., certificate in economics and business journalism; also attended Virginia Commonwealth University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, author, and educator. Associate professor of journalism and coordinator of journalism and professional writing program, College of New Jersey. Formerly worked as newspaper reporter for Philadelphia Inquirer and corporate communications manager.
AWARDS:Pulitzer Prize nominations (three times); Keystone Press Award; Journalism Service Award National Hemophilia Foundation Delaware Valley.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including American Journalism Review and Reuters Forum Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
Donna Shaw is a journalist and an associate professor at the College of New Jersey. “A former newspaper reporter and corporate communications manager,” wrote the contributor of a biographical blurb to the College of New Jersey Department of English website, “she specializes in writing about the impact of money and politics on medical research.” She is the coauthor, with lawyer Eric Weinberg, of Blood on Their Hands: How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs.
Shaw and Weinberg point out in their book the fact that a revolution that took place in the processing of blood made life much easier for sufferers from hemophilia—a condition in which an individual’s blood lacks the agents it needs to clot. As a result, hemophiliacs can lose enormous amounts of blood through what, in another person, would be a minor injury. “The advent of freeze-dried blood-clotting concentrates—made from human plasma and sold in glass vials along with sterile saline and syringes—allowed patients to self-administer the medicines, whenever and wherever they needed treatment,” declared Jason Zasky on the Failure website. “Yet the process of manufacturing medicines like Factor VIII involved collecting plasma at commercial plasma centers, which were often located in prisons, low-income communities and skid row neighborhoods. As such, they attracted donors who were more likely than most to be infected with dangerous viruses.”
One of these viruses was AIDS. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a disproportionate number of hemophiliacs contracted the AIDS virus, most of them by using blood-clotting concentrate that had been infected. Shaw and Weinberg show that the corporations that collected and treated the blood were aware of the risks and even had effective ways to destroy the virus, but chose not to do so. As a result hemophiliacs suffered illness and death that could have been prevented relatively simply. “There was never a finding of criminal conduct in the case,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “though the legal action resulted in tighter product safety.” The lesson is that when products are made in the health industry, whether they are biologic products, blood products, pharmaceutical drugs or other kinds of products, there’s always going to be a balance of benefit-risk assessment. Always,” Weinberg told Zasky. “And where there is a risk—and the risk can be eliminated or substantially reduced—the duty of care requires that that be done.” Blood on Their Hands “is a vivid example,” said Willis M. Buhle in Reviewer’s Bookwatch, “that through perseverance and the American justice systems, the victims of pharmaceutical corporate greed, corrupt or incompetent politicians, uninformed and negligent physicians can achieve deserved recompense.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, June 26, 2017, review of Blood on Their Hands: How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs, p. 167.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, September, 2017, Willis M. Buhle, review of Blood on Their Hands.
ONLINE
College of New Jersey Department of English Website, https://english.tcnj.edu/ (April 18, 2018), author profile.
Failure, http://failuremag.com/ (April 12, 2018), Jason Zasky, review of Blood on Their Hands.
Donna Shaw
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Donna Shaw
Nationality American
Alma mater Pennsylvania State University (B.A.)
Biotechnology Fellowships at the University of Maryland's Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and at Virginia Commonwealth University
Columbia University (M.S.)
Occupation Journalist, Author, and Associate Professor at The College of New Jersey
Donna J. Shaw is a journalist, author, and Associate Professor at The College of New Jersey, where she serves as Coordinator of the Journalism and Professional Writing program. She has served on the editorial advisory committee of TCNJ Magazine and as an advisor to The Signal, the college newspaper. A former newspaper reporter and corporate communications manager, she specializes in writing about the impact of money and politics on medical research.
Contents
1 Education
2 Teaching
3 Publications
4 Awards
5 References
Education
Donna Shaw received her bachelor's degrees in English and Journalism from The Pennsylvania State University. She later earned Biotechnology Fellowships at the University of Maryland's Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and at Virginia Commonwealth University. As a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, Shaw earned her Master of Science in Journalism and a Certificate in Economics and Business Journalism (concentration in healthcare economics).
Teaching
Donna Shaw teaches a variety of journalism courses, including Introduction to Journalism; News Editing and Production; Feature Writing; Computer Assisted Reporting/Research Methods; Beats and Deadlines; Media Law; Press History; Future of the News; and Topics in Journalism: Science Journalism.
Publications
“Wikipedia in the Newsroom.” American Journalism Review, February/March 2008: 40-45.
“A Fading Taboo.” American Journalism Review, June/July 2007: 34-39.
“Really Local.” American Journalism Review, April/May 2007: 54-57.
“Slow to React.” American Journalism Review, April/May 2007: 12-13.
“Online Scoops.” American Journalism Review, Oct/Nov 2006, 58-60.
“The Pulitzer Cartel.” American Journalism Review, Oct/Nov 2006, 40-47.
“Remaking the Front Page.” American Journalism Review, June/July 2006, 25-31.
“Dilemma of Interest.” American Journalism Review, Feb/March 2006: 56-61.
“The World Needs What We Do.” American Journalism Review, Feb/March 2006: 25.
“Global Guinea Pigs: Ethical Issues in Drug Testing.” The Reuters Forum Journal, Spring 1999: 18-21.
During her 17 years writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Shaw authored hundreds of bylined articles.
Awards
Donna Shaw was nominated by The Philadelphia Inquirer three times for a Pulitzer Prize, twice for health reporting. She was also awarded a Keystone Press Award, Public Service/Investigative, for The Philadelphia Inquirer series, “Blood, Money and AIDS”. She won the Journalism Service Award from the Delaware Valley Chapter of the National Hemophilia Foundation.
Donna Shaw
Associate Professor
Donna Shaw
Phone: (609) 771-2793
Email: shaw@tcnj.edu
Office: Bliss Hall 204
Donna Shaw received her bachelor’s degrees in English and Journalism from The Pennsylvania State University. She later earned Biotechnology Fellowships at the University of Maryland’s Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and at Virginia Commonwealth University. As a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, Shaw earned her Master of Science in Journalism and a Certificate in Economics and Business Journalism (concentration in healthcare economics). Donna Shaw was nominated by The Philadelphia Inquirer three times for a Pulitzer Prize, twice for health reporting. She was also awarded a Keystone Press Award, Public Service/Investigative, for The Philadelphia Inquirer series, “Blood, Money and AIDS”. She won the Journalism Service Award from the Delaware Valley Chapter of the National Hemophilia Foundation.
She serves as Coordinator of the Journalism and Professional Writing program. She has served on the editorial advisory committee of TCNJ Magazine and as an advisor to The Signal, the college newspaper. A former newspaper reporter and corporate communications manager, she specializes in writing about the impact of money and politics on medical research. Donna Shaw teaches a variety of journalism courses, including Introduction to Journalism; News Editing and Production; Feature Writing; Computer Assisted Reporting/Research Methods; Beats and Deadlines; Media Law; Press History; Future of the News; and Topics in Journalism: Science Journalism.
DONNA SHAW is an associate professor of journalism, and the chair of the Journalism and Professional Writing program at The College of New Jersey in Ewing Township. She is also a former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where her work was thrice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Blood on Their Hands: How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs
Publishers Weekly. 264.26 (June 26, 2017): p167.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Blood on Their Hands: How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs
Eric Weinberg and Donna Shaw. Rutgers Univ., $34.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-8135-7622-0
This insider account from Weinberg, an attorney and visiting lecturer at Rutgers, and Shaw, associate professor of journalism at the College of New Jersey, chronicles the legal battle fought on behalf of hemophiliacs against a pharmaceutical industry that failed to protect them from the potential for contracting hepatitis and AIDS through their blood-clotting medicines. "Most people with severe hemophilia who regularly infused commercial clotting drugs between 1980 and 1985 contracted the AIDS virus," the authors write. "Few involved in the devastation were willing to accept responsibility." Weinberg, a member of the legal team behind a 1994 class action negligence lawsuit, lends astounding detail to the suffering of unwitting patients--including a nine-year-old boy--and their frustrating fight for justice. There was never a finding of criminal conduct in the case, though the legal action resulted in tighter product-safety regulations that limited further infections. The narrative can be as complicated and dense as the case it describes, and though the book's pace suffers for it, the authors make a powerful and important case by unveiling the suffering that devastated families know "could have been entirely prevented." Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Blood on Their Hands: How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 167. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444416/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c2612fef. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497444416
Blood on Their Hands
Willis M. Buhle
Reviewer's Bookwatch. (Sept. 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Blood on Their Hands
Eric Weinberg & Donna Shaw
Rutgers University Press
106 Somerset St., 3rd Floor, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
9780813576220, $34.95, HC, 304pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: A few short years after HIV first entered the world blood supply in the late 1970s and early 1980s, over half the hemophiliacs in the United States were infected with the virus. But this was far more than just an unforeseeable public health disaster. Negligent doctors, government regulators, and Big Pharma all had a hand in this devastating epidemic.
The collaborative work of Eric Weinberg (a practicing attorney in New Brunswick, New Jersey) and Donna Shaw (Associate Professor of Journalism, and the Chair of the Journalism and Professional Writing program at The College of New Jersey in Ewing Township), "Blood on Their Hands: How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs" is an inspiring, firsthand account of the legal battles fought on behalf of hemophiliacs who were unwittingly infected with tainted blood.
As part of the team behind the key class action litigation filed by the infected, Eric Weinberg was faced with a daunting task: to prove the negligence of a powerful, well-connected global industry worth billions. Now Eric Weinberg and Donna Shaw tell the dramatic story of how idealistic attorneys and their heroic, mortally-ill clients fought to achieve justice and prevent further infections.
Critique: An impressively informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking expose of one of the American medical system's most shameful debacles in living memory, "Blood on Their Hands: How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs" is a vivid example that through perseverance and the American justice systems, the victims of pharmaceutical corporate greed, corrupt or incompetent politicians, uninformed and negligent physicians can achieve deserved recompense for themselves and those they love. Exceptionally well written, organized and presented study that also includes twelve pages of Notes and a ten page Index, "Blood on Their Hands" is an especially recommended addition to both community and academic library collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that "Blood on Their Hands" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $33.20).
Willis M. Buhle
Reviewer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Buhle, Willis M. "Blood on Their Hands." Reviewer's Bookwatch, Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511455016/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=273349c4. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A511455016
Blood on Their Hands
How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs.
Jason ZaskyApr 12, 2018
Blood On Their Hands Book Cover
Just a few years after HIV entered the world blood supply over half of the hemophiliacs in the U.S. were infected with HIV, not to mention other dangerous viruses like hepatitis B and hepatitis C. The story of how and why this happened is recounted in “Blood on Their Hands: How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs” (Rutgers University Press), a first-hand account of the legal battles fought on behalf of the hemophiliacs who were sickened by tainted clotting products.
It’s a riveting story, expertly told by Eric Weinberg—a New Jersey attorney who worked tirelessly for years on end on behalf of victims—and co-author Donna Shaw, a professor of journalism and the chair of the Journalism and Professional Writing program at The College of New Jersey. It’s also a hair-raising story, because what unfolded was anything but unforeseeable.
As Eric Weinberg notes in the following Failure interview, clotting medicines like Factor VIII and Factor IX transformed the lives of hemophiliacs beginning in the last 1960s and ’70s, allowing them to live relatively normal lives. (Hemophilia is a bleeding disorder in which the blood doesn’t clot normally. As a result, people with hemophilia bleed for a longer time than others after injury, and may also bleed internally, especially in the knees, ankles and elbows.) The advent of freeze-dried blood-clotting concentrates—made from human plasma and sold in glass vials along with sterile saline and syringes—allowed patients to self-administer the medicines, whenever and wherever they needed treatment.
Yet the process of manufacturing medicines like Factor VIII involved collecting plasma at commercial plasma centers, which were often located in prisons, low-income communities and skid row neighborhoods. As such, they attracted donors who were more likely than most to be infected with dangerous viruses. Worse yet, once collected, big shipments of the frozen plasma would be taken to a processing facility, where thousands of units at a time would be dumped into enormous vats. This saved on manufacturing costs but meant that patients who took “the factor” were exposed to a high risk of contracting hepatitis and HIV.
As we now know, Big Pharma, government regulators and many doctors were aware of the potential dangers, especially after patients began falling ill. Manufacturers could have rendered the medicines germ-free, yet “until a foreign competitor began heat-treating its hemophilia medicines to kill viruses, none of the major fractionators that purchased plasma from prisoners or other high-risk sellers followed suit,” note Weinberg and Shaw in the book.
In the course of the interview below, Weinberg discusses the process that was used to collect and process the plasma, the legal challenges faced in trying to get justice for the victims, how the litigation was resolved, and whether he views the outcome of the cases as a success or failure.
The book opens with a vignette from Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Tell me about where companies were getting their supplies of plasma in the 1970s and ’80s.
The manufacturers—which included Baxter, Bayer and Rhone-Poulenc—would collect plasma from paid donors. People would come in, they would be hooked up to the collection machines, the whole blood was taken from them, then the plasma would be fractionated out and the red blood cells returned to the body. Since this was the method of collection, it would permit donors—who were paid five, ten or fifteen bucks—to return more than once a week. So vast amounts of the human plasma were collected from paid donors in prisons and urban areas, and these were the sources of most of the human plasma used to produce the products.
There was some controversy about the source of the plasma, and buying the plasma was not a great idea. That was the position taken by some pretty responsible people in the medical and scientific community, because when you are purchasing plasma from folks—they used the word donors but they were paid—those people need money. They are usually not working and have other issues, and in the prisons there were high incidences of hepatitis. In the private community—same thing—you had people who had already been infected with transmissible blood borne viruses. So using paid donors was controversial because there were concerns about the rates of infected or tainted plasma. Going back to the seventies the concern was not HIV, which was not known yet, it was hepatitis B and a newly discovered strain of hepatitis initially called Non-A, Non-B, which later became known as hepatitis C.
Part of what we argued as a duty of care on the companies was to find ways to sterilize the plasma collected from paid donors. To be clear, when companies like Baxter and Bayer would collect this plasma they would either have their own centers or have contracts with companies that ran these plasma centers. The plasma would be collected from donors and it would be frozen and shipped to the manufacturers’ plants, which were located mainly in the U.S. When shipments arrived they would be fractionated and the clotting factor—Factor VIII or Factor IX—would be dumped into vats—big, gleaming metal vats.
So when the plasma products were produced and packaged and put into vials that could be mixed with saline and drawn into needles and infused in the body, the plasma came from thousands or tens of thousands of paid plasma donors. The relevance of that to the litigation was, when you’re exposing someone who is a hemophiliac to the plasma of literally thousands of paid donors, you’re increasing the risk that there will be infectious viruses in the product because the more donors the more risk.
Of course, the endgame that brought us into the litigation was that the rate of infection in the hemophilia community was very high. As a result of the way the product was manufactured, most of the community that was using these products on a regular basis got infected with viruses, including HIV.
The process of pooling the plasma sounds egregious. Did the companies have an understanding of what they were exposing people to?
That was an issue in the case. They did have an understanding; the feeling expressed by the companies was that the benefit of the product outweighed the risk. That is, the benefit of the clotting factor product—the way it affected and impacted people’s lives was substantial. It enabled them to travel and move around and not have to go to the doctor’s office or the hospital. They could infuse themselves or could be infused by family members.
But it also increased the risk of infection and ultimately our contention was that the risk, which was known to the companies, outweighed the benefits, particularly since the sterilization of fractions of plasma had been developed back in the 1940s and ’50s when plasma products were used on soldiers and there were outbreaks of jaundice. [That is], scientists were hired by the companies to develop methods of sterilization, methods that were very successful. Our position was that that could have been done for these clotting factor products as well.
The reason it wasn’t done, I believe, is that Factor VIII and Factor IX are heat sensitive enzymes and if the enzymes are not stabilized they can be destroyed by heat very easily. But our contention was that those processes were available and discoverable and developable and they could be scaled up—and should have, given the risk.
Our argument was that infectious diseases in products made from human plasma hold the risk of transmitting new, previously undiscovered viruses. The story of hepatitis C was a baseline story for us because that was an example of a virus not previously recognized that was recognized by the mid-1970s or so to be in the plasma. That confirmed the risk that new viruses can appear, therefore sterilization is essential for the protection of the patients.
Hemophiliacs didn’t understand the dangers they were being exposed to, right?
Well, every person with hemophilia has a different understanding; everybody comes to the table with their own mindset. I don’t think it’s fair to say they didn’t have an understanding. Having worked closely with folks in the community, I believe they accepted the position of the companies that the benefits of the product outweighed the risks. But our argument was that that was an incorrect assumption and the proof of that is what happened, because HIV infection was devastating.
Tell me about some of the challenges faced in getting justice for the victims.
When I got into the cases back in the early nineties a number had been tried to verdict. All but one had been defense verdicts and the one plaintiff’s verdict had been reversed. So it was difficult to prove risk, it was difficult to prove knowledge; it was difficult to prove the availability of methods to inactivate or sterilize—to basically remove the viral contaminants. And the arguments about benefit and risk were compelling. Those were defenses that were raised very effectively by companies and the lawyers who represented them. These were very difficult cases to win. Our job was not easy.
And the statute of limitations was an issue as well?
The statute of limitations was a defense because most people with hemophilia were infected beginning in 1978, ’79, ’80, ’81, ’82. The infections with HIV continued into ’83, ’84, ’85. But a lot of time passed between when the infections occurred and when people came forward with their claims.
The statute of limitations varies state by state but is basically calculated from when someone is aware they have been injured due to the potential negligence or improper conduct of another, and it’s a year up to sometimes three or four years. But those periods of time had passed.
In our cases, which were in New Jersey and New York, we recognized this was a major problem. So we were motivated to develop a strategy to get the laws changed—to extend the statutes of limitations for these people, who were innocent people. They didn’t delay filing lawsuits because they didn’t care or because they thought the law didn’t apply to them. They didn’t file cases because having HIV was humiliating and it was a difficult decision to make.
Ultimately, one of the things that we did that I was very pleased about was to develop community-based efforts to persuade legislators in New Jersey and New York to extend the time within which people with hemophilia could bring their claims. And we were successful. Christy Whitman in New Jersey and George Pataki in New York signed these bills into law. I don’t think there were any other states in which the statutes of limitations were extended by statute. So it was a problem.
But we were able to survive statute of limitations challenges in many cases because of changes in the law, or based on arguments that statutes of limitation for children under the age of 18 typically don’t begin to run until they reach the age of majority.
Then there were some cases that survived because the arguments were made that “I didn’t know that there was a failure on the part of the companies,” so the statute couldn’t have begun to run when I was infected. And those arguments were successful. But it was a tough issue for the plaintiffs, for sure.
How was the litigation resolved?
We started in 1991; the litigation started a few years before that. We got a lot of people coming in the door in the community and we filed individual cases. Then in 1993 a number of lawyers filed for Multidistrict Litigation and class action litigation. Multidistrict Litigation is a statutory setup that’s the consolidated litigation of a large number of claims with similar background. If the panel of senior federal judges deems the matter appropriate for Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) handling, the motions are granted and the matter is assigned to a single federal judge. In our case it was Judge John F. Grady in Chicago, in the northern district of Illinois.
All of the cases that had been filed in federal court were then transferred to that court for management. And that judge would then appoint steering committees—on both sides—of lawyers who had experience and knowledge. I was appointed to that committee by Judge Grady. We also had individual cases in New Jersey and New York that were in state court so they were not transferred to the MDL.
Basically what happened was that the companies made offers of settlement in 1996 that resolved most of the claims. The damage was $100,000 per victim, which some of us thought was a low number, but again, the risks of litigation were substantial. So it was accepted by most. Then a number of folks who had filed their individual cases rejected the offer and had their cases proceed individually. Ultimately those cases were also resolved and the settlements were, in our cases, higher than $100,000. The settlements were confidential but we were pleased with those results. It all came to an end in the early 2000s.
What should we learn from this?
The lesson is that when products are made in the health industry, whether they are biologic products, blood products, pharmaceutical drugs or other kinds of products, there’s always going to be a balance of benefit-risk assessment. Always. It’s part of the basic format of drugs being approved in the United States. So make sure you understand the risk and benefit. And where there is a risk—and the risk can be eliminated or substantially reduced—the duty of care requires that that be done.
With some time to reflect, do you view the legal resolutions as a success or failure?
I think that getting recovery for everyone was a success. I think that most of the people in the community who received settlements were satisfied, even if the numbers were in some instances lower than we thought or hoped to recover for the group. It took a lot of time and the sadness of this was that a lot of victims died from the diseases that they got from the products.
Was it a success or failure? That’s a very good question and I think the answer is it was both. I think the products are better; the companies have done better and I think they learned. I got to meet folks on the company side and a lot of the lawyers representing them. They weren’t bad people but lessons did need to be learned.