But, because of the current restrictions, they are unable to donate. There may be gay men who have recovered from COVID-19 and interested in donating their plasma, potentially with valuable antibodies in their plasma. If there’s an individual who has had COVID-19 and has recovered, for instance, we’re asking for those people to consider donating plasma as a potential therapeutic for other people, for clinical trials, etc. That may be helped by the change in the US government going from 12 months to three months restrictions for gay men, but the reality is that is still a restriction on a lot of people who would be willing participants from donating blood.Īt Penn, right now, we’re working on things like trying to develop convalescent plasma donations, but we’re aware of all these different ways people could be donors to try and contribute to the medical effort to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. We are in a situation where there is a dramatic limitation in our blood product pool. I believe our needs for blood have also risen, at least in certain regions.
And certainly, in this current COVID-19 pandemic, many blood drives have been canceled, and people are much less able to safely donate blood, so our supplies of blood have fallen. And many people have regarded even this less restrictive ban as a homophobic and outdated process. So, the rationale behind banning a whole group of people who are sexually active, regardless of the actual risk they have of being HIV-positive, is questionable. There is a small period of time where a person could be acutely infected, and we wouldn’t be able to test that either from a person’s blood, but our assays would be able to detect any virus in the blood. We can do tests on individuals’ blood to see whether they have been infected with very great sensitivity. Our ability to screen blood products for is really excellent right now. But they are still restricting men who have had sex with men within the past three months from donating blood.
In 2015, the ban was changed to one year, meaning a gay man would have to abstain from sexual activity for a full year in order to donate blood.Ĭoinciding with the recent shortages of blood donation, the FDA has changed restrictions from one year to three months.
Up until 2015, any man who had had sex with another man was banned from blood donation for life. So, this has evolved a long way, but the US has still maintained a fairly regressive policy that a lot of people believe puts irrational or homophobic restrictions on who could donate blood. We have good tests to diagnose people with HIV disease and we have sensitive assays to test blood products to make sure they are safe to be given for donation. We’ve obviously come a long way both in terms of our understanding of the epidemiology of and our ability to safely test and screen blood products. When the ban was started, in 1985, blood banks had limited abilities to test blood products, so they banned donations from several groups who were found to have higher rates of HIV disease, including gay men. Back in the 1980s, the FDA placed restrictions on blood donations by gay men.