National blood supply shortage: will the FDA lift its ban on gay and bisexual donors?
Last week, the Red Cross in the United States announced that the country is currently experiencing a critical blood supply shortage, due to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. LGBTQ activists and more than two dozen members of congress quickly sprang to action and criticized the FDA for its discriminatory donation policies currently active throughout the country.
Sexually active men who have sex with other men are currently banned from donating blood in the United States. If a gay or bisexual man wants to donate his blood, he is legally mandated to abstain from any same-sex activity for a period of three months prior to the donation date.
In the wake of the Red Cross announcement, twenty-two U.S. senators collaborated and wrote a letter to the Food and Drug Administration, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services, recommending the removal of their discriminatory blood donation policies that exclude sexually active gay and bisexual men.
The FDA first imposed this regulation in 1983 during the height of the AIDS pandemic. The Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ activist group in the United States, says that the continued ban does not reflect the current state of science and “continues to unfairly stigmatize one segment of society.”
In 2015 the policy was amended to allow men engaging in sex with other men to donate if they abstained from such activities for up to one year before donating. Then in 2020, the policy was further revised again to shorten the abstinence period to three months, but considering the advancement in scientific understanding, three months is even unnecessary at this point.
The Center for Disease Control requires all donated blood to be tested for infectious diseases anyway, so even on the off chance that a donation was made that was HIV positive, it would be caught before being administered to another person. Lifting this ban would increase the blood supply available from donors by up to four percent. That’s a whopping 615,300 pints of additional blood per year.
With this crisis of blood supply shortage, we think it’s time the United States joins the ranks of other nations like the United Kingdom and France, who have already removed such discriminatory policies from their practices.
