Dear FDA Blood Products Advisory Panel: Fuck You
LatestLast week, the FDA Blood Products Advisory Panel met to discuss the potential overturn of the FDA’s longstanding ban on allowing gay and bisexual men to donate blood. They chose to uphold this ban. This is an erroneous decision.
As Mother Jones notes, last month an entirely different committee convened by the Department of Health and Human Services approved a measure (by a 16-2 margin, no less) that would’ve allowed gay and bisexual men to donate blood if they’d been celibate for at least one year. Granted, the proposed measure would still have been regressive considering we have much more fast, accurate ways of testing for HIV/AIDS than we ever have before, and it would’ve still applied radically different standards towards men who have sex with men than towards anyone else (standards with a history of encouraging stigmatization towards gay and bisexual men). Still, it was better than nothing, very much like the Affordable Care Act compared to the actual system of socialized medicine the US would now be utilizing if +/- 50% of Congress wasn’t made up of creatures Sam and Dean Winchester regularly eviscerate on Supernatural.
The 17 members of the FDA’s Blood Products Advisory Panel, however, decided that the cause of treating gay and bisexual men with equality under the law was just about “policy and civil rights”* and that it was some sort of a contravention of sound science. This is an interesting assertion considering that the Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers, and the American Medical Association all believe in a wholesale overturn of the ban (the Centers for Disease Control have, as far as I can tell, been curiously silent on the subject). Their stance is understandable considering our significant national blood shortage. There’s also a ban on organ tissue donations from gay and bisexual men which no one seems to be talking about, one which apparently applies, as per the linked story, even if relatives assert that the deceased was celibate. Like blood donations, we’re suffering a massive tissue donation shortage.
The main issue with the ban has to do with its absurdly inconsistent application, as there are currently no FDA blood donation standards pertaining to heterosexual sex whatsoever, regardless of at-risk behaviors. A friend told me recently that when she went to donate blood some months ago, she informed them she’d had unprotected receptive anal intercourse with a man who had engaged in unprotected receptive anal intercourse with a man, and they expressed no issues whatsoever with her desire to donate.** This is perhaps unsurprising when one considers that the ban only came into existence in 1983 in response to the HIV/AIDS panic of the 1980’s.