The Council of Ministers plans to approve this Tuesday, at the proposal of the Ministry of Social Rights and the 2030 Agenda, the decree that regulates aid for the victims of Thalidomide, children who were born decades ago without arms or legs due to consumption by their mothers of a drug from the German Grünenthal against vomiting. With this measure, the department of Ione Belarra manages to respond to those affected after decades of claims.
The decree seeks to do justice to those affected in Spain, one of the countries that has taken the longest to support them, and regulates a series of financial aid for this, according to sources in the department of Belarra. In total, and after the evaluation of the cases by the Carlos III Institute of Madrid, 130 people will receive them.
The amount varies depending on the degree of disability contracted as a result of exposure to the drug. For example, and for a person with a 33% disability, it will amount to 396,000 euros in a single payment (at a rate of 12,000 euros for each point, as established in an additional provision of the General State Budget (PGE) of 2018 ).
The aid may be requested from the publication of the Royal Decree in the BOE and its management will be the responsibility of the Imserso, dependent on the Ministry of Social Rights.
To date, only 24 victims had received aid, according to a 2009 PGE provision. That attempt to repair the victims, however, ran into serious problems in determining the ratio of those affected by Thalidomide.
To determine the aid that is now approved, more than 600 complex analyzes have been carried out. In the process, geneticists from the National Health System, without the participation of the pharmaceutical industry or private companies, have designed a panel of genes that is unique in the world.
The truth is that there are no words to describe the long agony in which the Spanish survivors of the approximately 3,000 affected by that shame that was Thalidomide find themselves. Babies who were born without arms, without legs, or without both, with deformed extremities and who grew up thinking that these were things that happen, that genetics is capricious and that in the hype of life they had been touched by the misfortune of malformation.
Until one day they discover that their disabilities are due to the wrong doing (an expression that falls short) of a powerful German pharmacist, Grünenthal, who sold their mothers medicines against vomiting during pregnancy. A shame, yes, but even more if it is found that the Franco government continued to allow the sale of that damn compound in Spain when it had already been withdrawn in the rest of the countries.
But why have the Spanish victims not been compensated as the rest of those affected from other countries were, such as the Germans or the latest, the Italians? There is no clear answer, but it has a lot to do with Franco and his good relations with Germany and the pharmaceutical company.
This would partly explain the silence that existed on the part of the Francoist government when the withdrawal of the compound was ordered in November 1961 when its effects were verified, but not in Spain. “It was being sold until 1978. We have documents from the Ministry of Health that ordered its withdrawal in July 1969 (eight years later!), and copies of the Spanish vademecum up to 1976, as well as prescriptions issued up to 1978,” explains Rafael Basterrechea, vice president de Avite, the association that was born in the early 2000s to demand justice.
Their demands were heard and a Madrid judge, Susana Fernández Díaz, sentenced the pharmaceutical company to compensation with 20,000 euros per percentage point of disability. The ruling was clear: the cause-and-effect relationship of thalidomide and handicaps was proven. This sentence came in 2013, decades after it reached the British and German victims.
But the pharmaceutical appealed and in 2014, the Madrid Court annulled the conviction, alleging that the request for compensation was submitted after the deadline. Out of time!
