Habitual blood donor Leslie Sinclair was turned away from the Albert Halls clinic in the Scottish city of Stirling after refusing to answer a question on an intake form asking about whether he was expecting a child or had been pregnant during the prior six months.
Sinclair was sent home on Wednesday night from the clinic where, despite much-publicized efforts by the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS) to find 16,000 new donors, National Health Service (NHS) personnel refused to take his blood without a response to the pregnancy question.
"I am angry because I have been giving blood since I was 18 and have regularly gone along. I'm very happy to do so without any problem," Sinclair said on Thursday, according to the Daily Mail. He explained that while he had no objection to filling out forms about "medical conditions or diseases" because he knows "the blood needs to be safe," he found the pregnancy question baffling.
"I pointed out to the staff that it was impossible for me to be in that position, but I was told that I would need to answer, otherwise I couldn't give blood. I told them that was stupid and that if I had to leave, I wouldn't be back, and that was it, I got on my bike and cycled away," the retired engineering company driver said.
The 66-year-old, who claims to have donated over 125 pints of blood in the last 50 years, denounced the NHS' new policy as "nonsensical," pointing out that "there are vulnerable people waiting for blood, including children, and in desperate need of help." Pregnant women are required to wait six months after giving birth to donate blood.
The NHS launched what it described as its biggest-ever blood drive in October, calling for an unprecedented 100,000 new donors by the spring in anticipation of doctors returning to performing elective surgical procedures that were largely shut down or postponed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The agency also announced last June that "everyone" would be asked "the same gender-neutral questions" in what a PSA video called "our most inclusive donation experience yet."
SNBTS director Marc Turner explained that "while pregnancy is only a relevant question to those whose biological sex or sex assigned at birth is female, sex assigned at birth is not always visually clear to staff." He cited the NHS' "duty to promote inclusiveness" as the basis for requiring the clearly-male Sinclair to share his pregnancy status.
Source: Man rejected from blood drive over pregnancy question
See, also: 'Youth transplants' really can slow the ageing process
See, also: Ambrosia, the Young Blood Transfusion Startup, Is Quietly Back in Business
See, also: Youth Blood Harvesting: Another 'Conspiracy Theory' Vindicated as Fact
(Editor's note: Your humble editor has been donating blood for nearly 40 years - for over 30 years, we have been a platelet donor, as well.
We, too, quit donating, a few months ago, for similar reasons.
Why did we quit donating platelets?
Well, we had been donating platelets down in the Bay Area, for well over a decade, when family housing became unaffordable, and forced our family to move 300 miles away from the Bay Area. We had received an award for donating platelets over a hundred times, even before we moved to Humboldt County.
So after settling down in Humboldt County, one of the first things we did was look into donating platelets. It turned out that the local blood bank [Northern California Community Blood Bank, hereafter to be referred to as 'NCCBB'] had a recreational vehicle, specially equipped for collecting platelets, that came to Fortuna several times a month. We were soon 'on the bus'.
Fast-forward a few years; the bus is having troubles and is spending a lot of time at the mechanics' shop. Some of the problems may be due to lack of maintenance, because there is only one man employed by the blood bank, and he is the only one interested in doing things like checking the oil - which is important, because this vehicle also travels up to Del Norte County, to collect platelets from personnel at Pelican Bay State Prison. That last man on the job retires; and, soon after, NCCBB is forced to retire their specially equipped recreational vehicle. Now, if we want to donate platelets, we have to make a 40-mile round trip, from Fortuna, at our own expense.
Even before the RV was retired we were talking to some of the nurses about what the blood bank would do if the RV failed. We proposed converting a school bus - not a far-fetched concept, as the RV, itself, had obviously been retrofitted, decades before, and the scars were still visible, even today. We did considerable research on school buses and vendors. It is a huge marketplace - school buses are overbuilt, and frequently replaced, and there are hundreds of rust-free buses for sale, in every state.
We are a systems analyst with 40 years of experience working in extremely technical environments, including experience building data centers that are hardened against earthquakes. We had watched the nurses deal with computer and networking problems on their blood bank bus for most of a decade. We'd even helped resolve a few. The machines that actually collect the platelets, it turns out, run Linux. And so it was not unreasonable to consider the mobile blood bank as very similar to a mobile data center.
As it so happens, NCCBB is not the only one whose mobile infrastructure is aging. Humboldt County possesses a few mobile command centers, installed in old bread trucks - oh, sorry, guys, 'delivery vans' - that are also showing their age. If the county got organized, they could use this process to convert a few school buses into command centers, too, and put some money in local pockets. Other counties might be interested, too.
But the blood bank management did not seem too interested in our thoughts or our research.
Fast-forward to November, 2021, when we are sitting in the chair, in Eureka, donating platelets, when an earthquake strikes and we get to see, first hand, how little training the relatively young nursing staff has received on what to do during an earthquake - basically, they have been trained to protect themselves, instead of the donors.
We decided that perhaps the blood bank needed an infusion of new blood.
As it so happened, the blood bank's website had an opening posted: they were looking for a director of quality control. We thought we might be able to add some value to the organization. So we applied.
That was before Christmas. Christmas passed, and then we were into January, 2022. It was probably right around then that we reached out to the management of the blood bank and asked if they planned to interview us.
The response to our question left us with the impression that (a) they were not interested in employing us; (b), they already had selected the person they intended to hire; and, (c), although they did not come right out and say it, our intuition was that they had ignored our application and that the interviewing process was now over.
The person we spoke with tried to imply that somehow the job required some sort of special insight into blood chemistry; but the changes made to the hastily modified job description only referred to numbers, not qualities, leaving us with the impression that, if true, perhaps the job title should have been Director of QUANTITY Control, rather than Director of QUALITY Control.
The need for a quality control person also raised some interesting questions about what was going on within the blood bank. Did they not trust their nurses to write things down correctly? Did they not trust their blood chemists to write things down correctly? What, exactly, was this quality that NCCBB was trying to get a handle on?
All of these questions could have easily been answered with a 60-minute job interview, of course. But we were never offered an opportunity to interview and learn the answers to these questions.
It's tempting to say, "Ooh, it's too technical for you", but, honestly, we dropped out of high school with a California High School Proficiency Exam at the age of 15 so we could go to college and learn computer programming, then became a self-educated C programmer and UNIX/Linux systems administrator, network administrator, database administrator, and firewall administrator ... so, we don't think we would have a lot of trouble learning how to check numbers.
Our sense was that they didn't want to hire us because we were a man, and they wanted to hire a woman for the job.
We searched NCCBB's website for a board of directors, but if the organization has one its membership seems to be a secret. Our guess is it is composed exclusively of women.
We decided that if the NCCBB's management didn't want to work with us, or even interview us, that the NCCBB probably didn't need our donated platelets, either. So we quit donating to NCCBB.
NCCBB did get a new blood bank bus. For some reason, though, it is equipped to only collect whole blood; not platelets or other special products. Which is odd, because special products, such as platelets, are significantly more valuable to the medical marketplace, and priced accordingly. Platelets in particular have a shelf life of only a few days - unlike whole blood, which can be frozen.
There is a marketplace for whole blood, though. Obnoxiously wealthy old people - such as Larry Ellison, one of the early adopters of this disturbing regimen - are trying to prolong their existence, by paying obnoxious amounts of money to be injected with the plasma of younger, healthier people.
Presumably, these "younger, healthier people" are all dumb enough to give their blood to strangers, for free, without inquiring as to where it will end up, because we can't see a long line of people queueing up to donate to Larry Ellison, specifically ... especially, in Hawaii.
Fortunately, not far away, there's California ...
We would bet serious money that Henry Kissinger is surreptitiously receiving young adults' plasma.
We would also bet that Joe Biden is not receiving this therapy.
The more we think about this whole blood marketplace, the more confident we become that there is an enormous potential for criminality.
The phlebotomist would honestly collect blood from the donor and log it in the system. The blood chemists would honestly test the blood they received. There would not be much opportunity to do any black marketeering.
So an organization intent upon making money on the black market from the illicit sale of donated whole blood would need someone in a position of authority who could subsequently determine whether donated units were good or not. 'Director of quality control' would, incidentally, be just about perfect.
Units that were tagged as no good by "quality control" would be officially disposed of via medical waste facilities.
Herein lies the problem: we suspect that the medical waste is not being audited to insure that its contents correspond to the number of units officially marked bad in the inventory.
Therein lies a huge opportunity to pretend to throw away units, while actually separating them, retailing them on an inferred black market, and splitting the proceeds amongst the participants.
We are not saying that NCCBB specifically is participating in such a scheme. What we are saying is that (a), given the current parameters it is likely - nay, almost certain - that a black market exists; (b), that such a black market would inevitably flourish in smaller, isolated regions of the country, where diligence and attention to detail is sometimes lacking; and (c), that at several hundred dollars for every supposedly ruined or bad unit of freely donated blood, that's quite an incentive, so the odds are excellent that someone, somewhere, is doing this, and we should all be on the lookout for it.
If we were to call around and discover that a charity is going around, buying new buses ... giving them fabulous custom paint jobs ... not equipping them with apheresis machinery, but then, generously donating the buses to remotely located blood banks, out in the backwoods ... we would be curious about the motives of that allegedly non-profit corporation, and we would be curious about the motives of those people funding its activities, too.
We remind everyone that blood banks are 501(c)(3) non-profit corporations. If any of this non-profit whole blood is being turned into for-profit plasma somewhere along the line, that would probably be black market organ or tissue harvesting. FDA & IRS, please take note.
If you are a medical technician or a law enforcement officer and you are wondering what you should be looking for ... what you are looking for, are pints of whole blood, frozen solid. They will be packed with something cold - maybe dry ice. They will require insulation to remain frozen during transport. The units will require a freezer while they are awaiting transport. This will all be in close proximity to your facility's blood lab.
You are looking for someone who, every so often - maybe every day - brought a cooler to work, with their lunch in it; or, possibly, a backpack, with an insulated bag inside. Your best chance, in many cases, will be to review old security videos of the employees' entrance, and take note of those carrying coolers out of the building. Dry ice or CO2 gas dispensing stations would be worth monitoring, too. Don't ignore backpacks. A FLIR-type thermal camera might be useful - tuned for cold, not heat.
It's likely that if such a ring came into existence ten years ago, that by now it has managed to arrange for one of its participants to be employed on the receiving end. Then the criminals could use the official methods of transporting frozen blood to ship it to a central blood bank, where their agent is employed - no risky smuggling required.
After shipping the blood to the centrally located blood bank, the participants whose more remotely located blood banks collected the blood each suddenly 'discover' a few units whose quality they are 'concerned' about, and call their agent at the receiving end, and inform them about these 'suspect' units. The agent at the receiving end then removes those units from the inventory, marks them as "medical waste, destroyed" ... and surreptitiously transports them out of the building, still frozen, to the buyer - who then processes it and uses it to provide plasma treatments to anyone who has the money and the connections.
The 'tell', here, would probably be the statistically anomalous number of bad units being reported after transfer of custody.
We've given some thought to donating down in the Bay Area, but the last time we visited the blood bank in San Francisco they tried to read some legal thing to us, out loud, as if we were a Third Worlder struggling to understand English, or an illiterate five-year-old - probably, a requirement forced upon them by their lawyers, who think that will increase their chances of winning a lawsuit if they can prove that donors are read to, like small children, instead of being trusted to read things themselves, like adults - and so, at this time, it looks like those people in operating theaters who are losing blood and are badly in need of platelets are shit out of luck - bigotry, and prejudice, and incompetence, disguised as bureaucracy, and maybe a black market, too, is choking everything into uselessness.
Or maybe someone in the middle is just trying to drive prices up. One thing is for sure - the donor system is not working like it used to.
Honestly, we've been dissatisfied with NCCBB, and blood banks in general, since the COVID thing began. How can you collect blood from people and not care if the blood you are collecting has spike proteins, or not?
If we were a surgeon we wouldn't want to be dumping contaminated blood into our patients, lying, cut open and vulnerable, on the operating room table. Don't they have enough problems?
The blood bank staff seemed more and more like sheep, just doing what they were told by the Red Cross and not asking questions or thinking for themselves. It's safe to assume that anyone who dared to question their orders was terminated.
We did not feel like our life was safe in their hands. Anyone who had COVID was shedding COVID viral particles all over other donors. Vaccine shedding exists. The masks are useless. UV-C is much more useful. So is ozone - but California has outlawed it. The public's concerns about the vaccines were and are not without reason.
It's hard not to suspect that the whole blood banking infrastructure has turned into a clusterfuck of people who claim to be medical professionals, just going through the motions to collect their paychecks.
Now, we know that the COVID vaccines contained all sorts of toxic adjuncts, and that the people who were vaccinated are all at risk of dying, suddenly, for no reason. Is the blood bank training new employees to fill in if they all start dying? Of course not. It's not their job. Nobody is paying them to do that. And so, two years from now, we are not even sure we will have a blood bank in Humboldt County.
Food for thought.)
(UPDATE: Two days later, Roberta Luskin-Hawk - oh, look, another woman in charge, what a surprise - is abruptly stepping down as chief executive of St. Joseph and Redwood Memorial Hospitals and, presumably, fleeing the county.
Yes, that is correct - the moment Humboldt County experiences a medical emergency, our highly paid chief executive medical officer responsible for managing an entire county's medical resources, is running away.
Is her next destination the sunny island of Lanai? Or maybe the beaches of Israel? We wonder. These events have no connection with our less-than-48-hour-old article, we're sure. Have a nice vacation, Roberta. </sarcasm>
How does that line from the Bible go? "The wicked flee when no man pursueth" -- Proverbs 28:1)