THE Australian Democrats political party last night called for a Royal Commission into reports that hundreds of orphaned babies were subjected to secret medical tests in Melbourne from the second World War until 1970.
The Victorian state government has already promised an inquiry into allegations the children were injected with experimental vaccines against herpes and whooping cough. The Federal Minister for Health, Dr Michael Wooldridge, supported the Victorian inquiry, but said he believed the situation was not as "sinister or secretive" as had been suggested.
However he agreed that the practice had been wrong. The use of vulnerable children for medical research shouldn't have happened then and it could never happen today," Dr Wooldridge said.
The Melbourne Age newspaper broke the story in yesterday's edition. It said the tests were carried out by the then federal government's Commonwealth Serum Laboratories and at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for medical research in Melbourne. In the largest experiment 350 infants aged between three months and three years were given full adult doses of trial influenza vaccines. Some had adverse reactions including vomiting and abscesses.
The Age's report, based largely on a search of public records, said trial influenza, whooping cough and herpes vaccines were among those tested in orphanages and homes for orphaned babies. There was no suggestion any of the children died due to the experiments, although some became ill and feverish, it said.
Many of the orphanages were run by church orders.
The trials were carried out with the ready cooperation of the sisters in charge of the institutions," said Dr David Vaux, a spokesman for the world-renowned Hall institute.
Dr Vaux confirmed the experiments had taken place but said they involved only injecting safe skilled vaccines".
He said between 1945 and the 1960s viral epidemics raged through Australian hospitals, schools and orphanages; he claimed the experiments were necessary as well as ethical.
"The medical authorities desperately wanted to stop disease.
If [they] had just allowed it and let children die that would have been unethical," he said.
But a leading medical ethicist, Mr Nick Tonti-Filippini, said the trials breached the 1949 Nuremberg Code and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the subjects, as children, could not give consent.
A group representing former wards of the state in Victoria, Innovate, backed the public inquiry. "The government was totally responsible for these children and they used them as guinea pigs," an Innovate spokeswoman, Ms Heather Bell, said in a radio interview.