Bobcat: I'm glad it turned out well in their case.
Yes, both JW babies survived.
We wouldn't be reading about it if they hadn't - babies who die receiving experimental procedures/drugs usually don't make it into medical journals. We don't know if there were other babies that didn't survive previous to (or after) these two babies' treatment.
And of course we are all glad that the babies lived - that is exactly the basic human emotion that is played on when these cases occur. Not only is an infant being exploited, the parents are exploited. It is not difficult to convince JW parents to let their babies be used as guinea pigs. They are convinced that they are doing the right thing by denying blood for their baby and they will agree to anything that is proposed as an "alternative" treatment. Anything at all.
It is incredibly easy to get parental consent from JW parents for anything but a blood transfusion, even if the risks for the alternative procedure/drug far exceed the risks of a blood transfusion.
Dio: Yes. Even babies. They had probably been waiting for this opportunity.
Absolutely. Treating these JW babies with this drug didn't just pop up out of the blue.
It is a fairly complicated procedure to follow just to access the drug that was used in the above cases. At the time, the drug was being produced by Rochelle, a pharma company. This treatment would be off label. And then, note how quickly an independent company was started to promote the drug, and then how, once the clinical trial was completed on JW babies, the company Infacare was bought up by a much larger company.
I have only scratched the surface on the company, Mallinckrodt, that now owns Infacare, but... and this could be coincidental of course, seeing as Mallinckrodt is pretty large...but, it wasn't too difficult to turn up some JWs that are connected to, or work for, Mallinckrodt. Jus' sayin'...
"compassionate"my ass
Exactly.
That would be like saying that you were being compassionate by throwing out a life preserver to somebody that you had pushed overboard