By Emily Ngo
“I take it very personally as a citizen. I want to do my part during this pandemic to help other people. And unfortunately, I can’t,” Hoylman said.
Currently, gay and bisexual men can only give blood if they’ve been celibate for one year.
The policy is meant to keep HIV out of the blood pool. But HIV isn’t limited to gay people. And all blood donations are screened for it.
“Now, we do have ways where you can detect whether or not the blood is HIV-infected or not. So this is a very old-fashioned, discriminatory practice and it needs to be changed,” said City Councilman and LGBT Caucus Chair Daniel Dromm.
The Red Cross says recently canceled blood drives have meant 325,000 fewer donations at a time of great need.
The FDA told NY1 that its policy on gay donors stands, but it’s “actively considering the situation as the outbreak progresses.”
Meanwhile, there’s another consideration.
An openly gay survivor of COVID-19, like City Council Member Ritchie Torres, wouldn’t be able to donate blood and plasma for the purposes of combating the virus.
“We should have the ability to extract antibodies from the blood of LGBTQ survivors and give those antibodies to those who are sick in the hopes of fighting the infection and aiding their recovery. That to me is a matter of life and death,” Torres said.
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and other U.S. senators have written the FDA to urge policies based on individual risk factors, not ones that rule out an entire community.
Hoylman also wrote the FDA.
He said gay men would contribute an additional 600,000 blood donations.
“The other part I would add about the one-year abstinence: It suggests something very nefarious about gay men and our personal lives that I just reject outright. And I think it’s time that the science dictate policy, not homophobia,” Hoylman said.
See more here.
