advocates who said that was a start, but not enough. relaxed those guidelines even more, shortening the waiting period for men who have had sex with men to three months. On Thursday, not long after a Mother Jones journalist reported on his experience recovering from the virus and being turned away from a plasma program because he is gay, the F.D.A. eased the restriction, revising its guidelines to allow men who had not had sex with men for a year to donate blood. But advocates have said that many of the reasons behind the initial ban are moot in light of modern diagnostic technology. Gay and bisexual men have been most affected by H.I.V. commissioner.īeginning during the AIDS epidemic, gay and bisexual men were barred for life from donating blood as a precautionary measure intended to ensure that blood wasn’t tainted with H.I.V. “It is unacceptable that a gay or bisexual man cannot donate plasma to help develop Covid-19 treatments, even though no such restriction applies to straight people who are sexually active,” he wrote in the letter to Dr. to lift any restrictions on blood and plasma donation that are specific to men who have sex with men. He said he was set to send a letter today calling on the F.D.A. “This policy is now directly undermining our efforts to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.” “This is no longer a theoretical issue of discrimination against gay and bisexual men,” Scott Wiener, a state senator from San Francisco, told me. The agency has partnered with the American Red Cross to set up a kind of clearinghouse to match eligible plasma donors who have recovered from the virus with patients who need care.īut for many members of a community that was devastated by the AIDS epidemic - one of the few rough analogues for the current pandemic - signing up to help is out of the question: Men who have had sex with men in the past three months can’t donate plasma or blood, which is in desperately short supply.
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The Food and Drug Administration said on Friday that the agency would lead an effort to speed up the development of blood-related treatments. “This could really be an exciting treatment if it works.” Timothy Byun, a hematologist and oncologist who directs cancer research at St. “There are multiple benefits to think about, and since this is not a drug that needs to be manufactured, it could be obtained easily,” said Dr. So-called convalescent plasma has long been used to treat other infectious diseases, including Ebola, and while it’s still very much unproven for treating coronavirus, doctors say it’s worth trying now. Recently, though, a sliver of hope has emerged in the form of plasma from the blood of coronavirus survivors, which, as my colleague Denise Grady reported, can be a “rich source of antibodies.” For most people who have been infected, treatment is limited. As more people around the world are sickened by the coronavirus, there haven’t been many silver linings.