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David McIntosh: Stop the Debates – Plasma Shortages Are Costing Lives
David McIntosh/LinkedIn
Dec 4, 2025, 02:34

David McIntosh: Stop the Debates – Plasma Shortages Are Costing Lives

David McIntosh, Founder and Chair of United Plasma Action, posted on LinkedIn:

”Is you is, or is you ain’t my baby?

What is science for ? …?

Living with – often struggling with – modern medical science, I find my thoughts returning repeatedly to Dr Jacob Bronovski’s short but deeply moving book “Science and Human Values”.
Writing in the horrifying wake of the Second World War, Bronovski posed fundamental questions about Science – its rôle and its duty to Humankind.
What is Science for …..?

In my present work, in the field of Plasma-derived medicines, I find myself in almost constant argument with people and organisations who seem to believe that Science is for Scientists – for erudite people in laboratories and libraries, poring over each other’s publications and subjecting them to critical scrutiny – ignoring the facts in the real world.

They also often appear to believe that Science is only valid if it comfortably confirms them in their own personal beliefs.

While millions of patients and undiagnosed sufferers are dying each year, all over the underdeveloped World, groups of Western “scientists” are working in ever-decreasing circles of fruitless effort – not to try to help those people, but to try to prove that the most successful efforts to help them are “wrong” – misguided, immoral and dangerous. The mortality rates mount accordingly.

As some fellow LinkedIners will know, United Plasma Action’s efforts towards solutions to this global disgrace include arguing as follows –
• Empirically, pragmatically, the key evidence in this field is the actual experience on the ground – the lives patients are helped to lead – or not, as the case may be.
• One doesn’t need a statistical analysis to tell one that too many people are dying.
• However many learned journal articles one cites in support of one’s views, none of them is more relevant than the simple fact that too many people are dying
• However much one argues that this or that piece of evidence proves that Voluntary Uncompensated Donation of plasma is absolutely the right approach to life-saving – it doesn’t alter the fact that too many people are dying.
• However proudly one cites the papers that one believes “prove” that Voluntary Reasonably Compensated Donation is “wrong”, it doesn’t alter the fact that 80% of those lucky patients who are NOT dying, thanks to plasma-derived medicines, are alive today because of Voluntary Reasonably Compensated Donation.

Our plea therefore – to anyone interested in listening – is that the scientific endeavour in the plasma medicines field should ALL, without exception, be aimed at improving the lives of patients and undiagnosed sufferers, worldwide – NOT contrived with the express purpose of reinforcing and perpetuating individual beliefs, however sincerely held.

In Science, the only passion that can serve Humankind well is the passion for truth – not passionate “belief” in old ideas, however virtuous they may feel.

I believe ….
How, please, do others feel about this?”

 

 

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David McIntosh Donate Plasma Global Blood and Plasma Collections Global Plasma Supply Health Hematology Hemostasis Hemostasis Today Medicine 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘀𝗺𝗮 Plasma Shortage thrombosis United Plasma Action
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