Sunak Apologizes After Damning Report on U.K. Infected-Blood Scandal

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain issued a stark apology on Monday to victims and families of one of the country’s worst health care failures after a damning report found that blood contaminations that killed 3,000 people and infected more than 30,000 others could have been largely avoided.

“This is a day of shame for the British state,” Mr. Sunak told lawmakers in the House of Commons, where he made a “wholehearted and unequivocal apology” for what he said were repeated failings by British officials.

“I am truly sorry,” he said, just hours after publication of a long-awaited report that identified a “catalog of failures” over two decades by government and medical officials in Britain, most of them avoidable errors that were then covered up.

The 2,000-page report is the product of a nearly six-year inquiry that the British government ordered in 2017 after decades of pressure from victims and their families.

“Today’s report shows a decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life,” Mr. Sunak said. “At every level, the people and institutions in which we place our trust failed in the most harrowing and devastating way.”

He vowed that the government would pay “comprehensive compensation” to those infected and to their families but said details of those plans would be released Tuesday. He also promised that the government would study the report’s “wide-ranging recommendations” to avoid a repeat of the failures.