Contributing Writers: Azad Ali, Tangerine Clarke,
George Alleyne, Nelson King,
Vinette K. Pryce, Bert Wilkinson
GENERAL INFORMATION (718) 260-2500
Caribbean Life, M 10 arch 27-April 2, 2020
Time to end the ban on
Gay blood donations
By Paul Schindler, Gay
City News editor
With the coronavirus
pandemic creating a critical
shortage in the nation’s
supply of blood needed for
transfusions, platelets, and
plasma, out gay Manhattan
State Senator Brad Hoylman
has exactly the right
idea.
It is well past time for the
US Food and Drug Administration
to end the outdated
and discriminatory ban on
gay men donating blood.
Last week, on March 19,
the FDA put out an urgent
call for blood donations.
Many Americans who make
it a practice to frequently
give blood have been staying
away in recent days in the
interests of social distancing
to slow the spread of
COVID-19. Three days after
the FDA’s call for more donations,
Mayor Bill de Blasio
issued his own urgent call
for blood donations in what
has become the epicenter of
the nation’s health crisis.
A review of the policy’s
history makes clear just why
it is an irrational hobbling
of the nation’s public health
efforts.
In 1983 — just as the
nation’s hysteria about the
emerging AIDS crisis was
shifting into high gear —
the FDA put a blanket lifetime
ban on blood donations
by any man who had
engaged in sex with other
men, as well as on women
who had engaged sexually
with such men.
Over time, however, the
technologies applied in
screening blood donations
made it possible to prevent
the HIV virus from entering
the nation’s blood supply.
As early as 1997, the American
Association of Blood
Banks began to recommend
a rethinking of this policy.
Resistance within the FDA,
however, was strong. It was
not until late 2015 that the
agency adopted what it heralded
as a major reform.
It wasn’t really much of
a reform at all. The lifetime
ban on donations by gay
men, other men who have
sex with men (MSMs), and
women who have sex with
MSMs was reduced to a ban
on donations by anyone who
had engaged in such sex
over the previous year. In
other words, millions of gay
men and others could only
give blood if they had been
sexually abstinent for the
prior year.
As Hoylman’s March 24
letter to the FDA makes clear,
this restriction is absurd.
The current blood screening
technology, the Nucleic Acid
Test, detects HIV in donated
blood to the degree that the
risk of HIV infection from
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Continued on Page 11
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