David McIntosh: The Ethics of Plasma Donation
David McIntosh, Founder and Chair at United Plasma Action, shared Hemostasis Today’s post on LinkedIn:
“The need for honesty – and a swift re-focus on what really matters:
This interesting piece in Hemostasis Today is a quiet but very important reminder of a basic truth.
It’s also a powerful plea for remedial action.
It’s an obvious truth, but one that many have been trying to ignore for decades – with mortal consequences.
It is that Blood and Plasma Donation/Collection is done for one purpose and for one purpose only – to help PATIENTS – to ease their suffering and, God grant, save lives that would otherwise have been lost.
To many, this statement must sound so obvious as to be quite banal.
However, there is a long-standing almost universally worldwide notion that donation of these vital fluids MUST be done on a purely ‘altruistic’ basis; that giving volunteer donors a little financial compensation for their time and trouble somehow negates the heroic generosity of the act.
The assertion we are asked to believe is that ‘paid donors’ are so deeply undesirable as to be altogether a sinful phenomenon – infecting the donations they make with mystical tinctures that are esoterically pathogenic.
Yes… bizarre as it may sound, that is the official position of the World Health Organisation, the European Union and a host of other similarly misguided organisations and institutions.
If theirs were simply an eccentric oddity, no one would mind.
People are, on the whole, entitled to believe what they like – if it does no harm to others.
The problem with the recommendation of ‘altruistic donation’ is that it DOES DO HARM.
It inhibits blood and plasma collection, globally, in ways that result in widespread suffering and death.
Further highlighting the sad fatal absurdity of the ‘altruism’ fallacy, it has to be noted that some 80 percent of all the pharmaceutical grade plasma available in the World today comes from ‘paid donors’ – those generous people more appropriately described as Voluntary Reasonably Compensated Donors (VRCD) – in the USA, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechia and a handful of other forward-thinking countries.
If it were not for those donors in those countries, the global death-toll would be even higher.
And yet, the WHO, the EU, et al continue to stick stubbornly to their old counter-productive preachings and teachings – censoriously disapproving of VRCD.
They insist on something they’ve invented especially for this strange purpose – the notion of ‘financially neutral’ compensation.
Of course none of the officials who devise these rules come to work on the promise of financially neutral salaries.
Indeed, none of them can actually define satisfactorily what is even meant by ‘financially neutral’ donor compensation.
Yet the notion is actually soon to pass into Law in Europe…
Instead of spending time wondering at, these extraordinary preachings, we will all do well instead to listen to the calm words of Professor Jaworski.
He’s a much-respected Ethics Professor – so if anyone knows what altruism truly is, it will be he.”
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