To the best of my knowledge, despite much litigation, Bayer never did pay any settlement to the concentration camp survivors, which I heard would have been a tiny amount anyway. Can anyone confirm?

[The company's statement was in response to a New York Times report that it sold millions of dollars worth of an older version of the medication in Latin America and Asia while marketing a newer, safer product in the United States and Europe.]

Sorry. My blood's boiling.

Better that all those asians just bled to death, eh? I imagine too that the hospitals who bought the old stocks had the option to buy the new stocks, but decided to cut costs with the cut-rate medicine.

Careful with the politics on MeChat, shane, as you may not like the results.

Sorry, mischief, but you're way off with those comments:

Better that all those asians just bled to death, eh?

So the choice was one or the other? This was some kind of emergency situation and Bayer was doing something altruistic by supplying these drugs to Asia and Latin America, and couldn't have produced the preferred stock for them that instead was concurrently shipped to the U.S. and Europe? No. Sorry. Nothing personal, but your logic is faulty.

Careful with the politics on MeChat, shane, as you may not like the results.

Um, POLITICS? No politics here. It's an ETHICAL question.

Or did I offend your politics by insulting the Nazis? Are you equating that with me insulting, say, the American Republican party?

If this is too political, or if I offended the delicate sensibilities of any Bayer stockholders, MODS PLEASE DELETE AWAY!

I'm posting from the position of having only a little knowledge, which is always a dangerous thing.... That said, in 1984, wouldn't the bigger risk to hemophiliacs have been the lack of a screening test for HIV in the blood supply for transfusions? Is it known how many hemophiliacs were infected via transfusion vs. Factor VIII treatment? Did Bayer sell HIV/AIDS drugs back then, or have a development program? The whole thing seems more complicated than the conclusion-jumping quote in TFA (from a woman whose son had died) that Bayer's motivation was racial.

Previous MetaFilter threads on Bayer & Factor VIII: May 22, 2003 and August 20, 2007.

Yes, Bayer sucks.
Even shittier is that you'd be hard-pressed to find a large company that's been around for more than 60 years that wasn't involved with the Nazi's somehow. Ford, VW...and hopefully you're not using an IBM computer right now.

Nazis.

BTW -- the August 2007 MetaFilter FPP: "Blood Money : A widow is fighting to open records on how tainted blood plasma from Arkansas prisoners entered the U.K. and led to the death of her husband" references the documentary film: Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal.

MSNBC | Bayer Exposed: HIV contaminated vaccine.

I imagine too that the hospitals who bought the old stocks had the option to buy the new stocks, but decided to cut costs with the cut-rate medicine

New York Times: 2 Paths of Bayer Drug in 80's: Riskier One Steered Overseas (May 2003).

National Hemophilia Foundation: Bayer Continued to Sell Tainted Product to Asia and Latin America After Heat Treated Factor was Available in US (May 2003).

Aw, man, don't tell me Steve Jobs is a Nazi!

Thanks Shane. I am no longer surprised at actions from an EVIL CORP, but that doesn't mean I can't still get mad.

Yeah, Ford... Hitler had a picture of Henry Ford on his wall in the Berlin offices, right? I've heard Ford sent Hitler a sum of dollars on Hitler's birthday each year? And something about Ford keeping plants open in occupied countries?

Seriously, mods: If you're worried about the unlikely chance of getting a Cease-N-Desist letter from Bayer or Ford, feel free to delete. I think Bayer's more worried about the NYT right now, though, and the Times offended them more than I ever could and surely considered potential consequences first.

But seriously, it's the holidays, this is angry and unpleasant, and if you want to delete, go ahead. No worries. I'm thick-skinned. And pissed off most of the time anyway.
;-)

BTW -- just to be clear -- the CBS News article to which Shane links in the FPP is from May 2003. Since then (as evidenced by the previous MeFi threads), there's been some damning evidence vis-a-vis Bayer knowingly selling the tainted Factor VIII overseas.

As per the original May 2003 NYT's article that brought all of this to light:

"A division of the pharmaceutical company Bayer sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs -- medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS -- to Asia and Latin America in the mid-1980's while selling a new, safer product in the West, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

The Bayer unit, Cutter Biological, introduced its safer medicine in late February 1984 as evidence mounted that the earlier version was infecting hemophiliacs with H.I.V. Yet for over a year, the company continued to sell the old medicine overseas, prompting a United States regulator to accuse Cutter of breaking its promise to stop selling the product.

By continuing to sell the old version of the life-saving medicine, the records show, Cutter officials were trying to avoid being stuck with large stores of a product that was proving increasingly unmarketable in the United States and Europe.

Yet even after it began selling the new product, the company kept making the old medicine for several months more. A telex from Cutter to a distributor suggests one reason behind that decision, too: the company had several fixed-price contracts and believed that the old product would be cheaper to produce.

Nearly two decades later, the precise human toll of these marketing decisions is difficult, if not impossible, to document. Many patient records are now unavailable, and because an AIDS test was not developed until later in the epidemic, it is difficult to pinpoint when foreign hemophiliacs were infected with H.I.V. -- before Cutter began selling its safer medicine or afterward.

But in Hong Kong and Taiwan alone, more than 100 hemophiliacs got H.I.V. after using Cutter's old medicine, according to records and interviews. Many have since died. Cutter also continued to sell the older product after February 1984 in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and Argentina, records show. The Cutter documents, which were produced in connection with lawsuits filed by American hemophiliacs, went largely unnoticed until The Times began asking about them."

This is giving me a headache. Anybody got an aspirin?

Way to Godwin the thread from the beginning!

But yeah, this is pretty evil.

Thanks, ericb.

chococat and typewriter, thanks for reminding me that this is just corporate business as usual. I'm going through a personal struggle with my own hatred of corporations right now, and I almost didn't notice the serendipity. LOL. I'm just going though a process of realizing very subjectively what I always knew objectively, that in business Profit is the bottom line and there is no such thing as ethics.

I parsed the first line as Bare Nazis After All These Years giving me a horrid vision of naked octogenarians stomping around in naught but jackboots and screaming out Sieg Heil!

shane, I think you'll find that ethical considerations are the first casualty in the war between the medical needs of humanity and the profit margins of various corporate interests.

Surely, it is the greatest irony of our age: the richest nation has the poorest healthcare.