Blood Money - The Story of Life, Death and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry - Kathleen McLaughlin

Welcome to Grit Nation. I’m Joe Cadwell the writer, producer, and host of the show and on today’s episode I have the pleasure of speaking with author Kathleen McLaughlin, about her new book titled; Blood Money – The Story of Life, Death and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry.

In her book Kathleen turns the lights on a healthcare crisis hidden in plain sight and reveals a stunning example of economic inequality in action. 

Intertwined with her own story as a working-class American managing a chronic illness, she finds an industry that targets and exploits America’s most marginalized communities to feed the hunger for human blood plasma.

Over 20 million pay-for-extractions occur each year of American blood, which is then processed, and packaged for sale as part of a $30 billion-dollar global industry.

Blood Money reveals the controversial and unbalanced power structures behind the blood industry. 

From China’s blood black market to Silicon Valley tech startups, this electrifying expose demonstrates the shadowy overlap between big medicine and big business while painting a searing portrait of the extent to which American industry is eager to feed on the country’s most vulnerable.

The Show Notes

Kathleen McLaughlin
https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Kathleen-McLaughlin/179283499

Blood Money
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Blood-Money/Kathleen-McLaughlin/9781982171964

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Transcript

Joe Cadwell: 0:08

Welcome to Grit Nation. I'm Joe Cadwell, the writer, producer and host of the show. And on today's episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with author Kathleen McLaughlin about her new book titled Blood Money,The Story of Life, Death and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry. In her book, Kathleen turns the lights on a healthcare crisis hidden in plain sight and reveals a stunning example of economic inequality in action. intertwined with her own story as a working class American managing a chronic illness, she finds an industry that targets and exploits America's most marginalized communities to feed the hunger for human blood plasma. For 20 million pay for extractions occur each year of American blood, which is then processed and packaged for sale as part of a $30 billion global industry. Blood Money reveals the controversial and unbalanced power structures from behind the blood industry. From China's blood black market to Silicon Valley startups. This electrifying expose demonstrates the shadowy overlap between big medicine big business while painting a searing portrait of the extent to which American industry is eager to feed on the country's most vulnerable. After the episode, be sure to check out the show notes for more information about Kathleen and her work. And now on to the show. Kathleen McLaughlin, welcome to Grit Nation.

Kathleen McLaughlin: 1:42

Thank you, Joe. It's great to be here.

Joe Cadwell: 1:44

Hey, thank you so much, Kathleen, for taking the time to be on the show. Today. I'm really excited to introduce you and your work to my listener audience. You I understand you've written your first book, The title is blood money, the story of life, death and profit inside America's blood industry. That's a pretty fascinating title and a really, really interesting book and a very personal book, I began to understand as I started to read it, what got you to write this book outline.

Kathleen McLaughlin: 2:11

So this started in I guess it started almost 20 years ago, when I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease. And the treatment for that condition is medication made from other people's blood plasma. So for the past almost 20 years I've been having often on infusions of this drug. And every time I have one, I contemplate where this plasma comes from. Because it Well, first of all, the infusions take kind of a long time, five to six hours. There's a lot of boredom sitting in the chair, let's say, and it isn't, it's a very strange thing to have other pieces of other people's body going into your body. And so it just became this ongoing thing that I would think about where all this plasma came from. So I was I spent most of the last 20 years actually living in China. And I ended up doing a ton of reporting about the plasma industry in China and a major debacle that happened there in the industry. And then when I moved back to the US in 2016, or so I started digging around into the industry here and discovered that it was just as bizarre as China maybe even more so because it was so hidden.

Joe Cadwell: 3:35

And I understand why you were living in China. In order to get the do we call it medicine at this point, or what you need to take you

Kathleen McLaughlin: 3:45

can call it medicine Mo is I mean, it's a biologic, right. So it isn't, it's this weird class of drugs. It's not like taking a pill. Right? It's something different, but I think we can call it medicine. Okay.

Joe Cadwell: 3:55

You had to smuggle this medicine into China, in order to make sure you had a safe supply was it was safety concern when you were smuggling it in? Or what what originally got you to become an international smuggler of blood plasma.

Kathleen McLaughlin: 4:10

Yeah, so I'm back in the 1990s. China had tried to create what they called a plasma economy, which sounds very dry and boring. But what they did was tried to create an industry based on the blood of poor people. And so in one province, in particular, Hunan Province, which is sort of the breadbasket of China. The government started a bunch of plasma centers where they would pay farmers who previously hadn't had a lot of money in exchange for extractions of their blood plasma. Well, unfortunately, this all took off right around the time as the AIDS virus entered China. And those two things together created this viral bomb and HIV He basically infiltrated the Chinese blood supplies and plasma supplies and remained a threat for years and years and years. It was pretty under control by the time I got to China in the early 2000s. But there were still periodic incidences of outbreaks. And I knew enough, when I first got to China, I knew enough about this situation to know that if I had access to plasma drugs from the US, I should use those because they would be safer. And I talked to a lot of medical professionals in China, and a lot of patients in China who confirmed this to me and there were plenty of news stories. At that time, one of the major problems with the blood and plasma supplies in China was hepatitis C, there would be big outbreaks of hepatitis C in plasma drugs because they weren't treated properly. So. And on top of that, I had pretty good insurance back in the US. So it just was kind of easy for me to take the drugs and put it in my suitcase and go back to China where I was living, and then I would show up at the hospital there, and they would infuse the drugs for me which when I think about it now can you imagine a Chinese person coming to the US with a suitcase full of drugs, and showing up at a hospital in like Boston or wherever and saying eject these like we would, I can't imagine what we would do to someone if they tried to do that. But at that time, I would say China was a little more wild west, you know, you can really navigate your way around things.

Joe Cadwell: 6:37

I understood you work with hospitals until they got a little bit leery of it, then you just pick up and move on to the next hospital

Kathleen McLaughlin: 6:43

exactly, then we would bet I would bounce to the next place. And they often do get leery. So it would take like a usually a couple of years. And then I would get a call from the administration at the hospital saying we can't do this anymore. They were generally pretty chill about it. Part of the reason they were pretty chill about it was everyone in the medical system in China, the doctors and nurses and everyone else they knew about the problems and the blood supply. So they knew why I was doing this, you know, this was not, by this point, the AIDS debacle which I should probably quantify that. Somewhere around the best estimate is that a million people were infected with HIV through the plasma economy system in her Nan and the surrounding provinces. So we're talking about and this was in a period, right before there were available treatments for HIV and AIDS. And so we're talking about a really deadly incident that happened. So yeah, the hospitals generally in the beginning would be quite understanding because everyone knew about the AIDS debacle. And I should also tell you, the reason that this was smuggling is that in order to go in and out of China, you have to sign like most countries, most normal countries, you have to do a customs declaration form and on their customs declaration form explicitly asks you if you are carrying human blood or blood products, Oh, wow. Because they were trying to limit time I had made this decision that AIDS was a foreign disease, and that it was transmitted through foreign blood. And so they were restricting the import of foreign blood as a way to try and curb the AIDS outbreak.

Joe Cadwell: 8:37

Just for clarification, this was your own product, you were going to be using this for yourself. You weren't strapping it to sell.

Kathleen McLaughlin: 8:45

I was not selling it to anyone. No, it was no, I it was only for my own use. And I never did anything else with it. Like it's not I should clarify to like when I talked about smuggling drugs, this is not a fun drug. This is a medication that has a lot of icky side effects. It's not something anyone is going to do for kicks, right. So yeah, I just had my own personal medication that I was bringing in, but technically, you know, according to the regulations about bringing in foreign blood products, I was skirting the law.

Joe Cadwell: 9:19

Yeah. And so I you know, before reading your book, I was trying to wrap my head around how giving blood would create an epidemic if if the blood that was being given was tainted, and but you know, evaluated and deemed clean. But the difference is we're not giving blood here we're not talking about a one way transaction of blood coming out of your body. It's actually plasma. And so your blood is being taken out being stripped to the white blood cells, the red blood cells, the plasma is being extracted, but the rest of its being pumped back into your body and that's where this cross contamination comes from.

Kathleen McLaughlin: 9:58

That's right. So What happens when you donate blood, like you said, it's very easy a one way transaction, the blood comes out, it goes into a bag, it goes away. And that's it, nothing re enters your body. When you donate plasma, it's a different process, they put a tube in your arm that extracts your blood. And then it goes into a centrifuge that spins the red blood cells out from the plasma, and keeps your plasma and re infuses the rest of the blood back into your body. If that I mean, that's an overly simplistic kind of explanation of how it works. But yeah, so you have this, you have material going back into so what happened in China, and I should be very clear about this, the way the system is set up in the US is almost certainly now would never happen here. This isn't this is not a risk to Americans, because of safety protocols and the way things are designed now. But what happened in China is that there were so many people who wanted to sell their plasma, that they were cutting corners. So they would reuse tubing, they would reuse needles, and there are stories about times where they would share the centrifuge among donors. And so there were all these opportunities for infecting fill blood that was going back into people. So theoretically, I mean, I guess you could say, basically, the clinics, in a lot of instances, were actually infecting people with HIV in the process of plasma donation.

Joe Cadwell: 11:30

Yeah. And China did not want that level of exposure. They started blaming this as being a Western disease. And your story against a starts in China, there's two influential women that you had a chance to interview here in the US that had had to leave China immigrate to the US because of their involvement with exposing this atrocities that Chinese government were trying to cover up. Would you care to talk about right either? Yeah,

Kathleen McLaughlin: 11:56

of course. So there were two doctors Galio J. and Wang Shu ping, who were both physicians in Hunan Province, where where this happened. And when this all happened, Wang Shu ping specifically worked in a plasma center, and she was in charge of testing and ensuring the health of plasma donors, and she was an expert in hepatitis. So she began to notice in the donor samples, a big presence of hepatitis C. And that was a major red flag to her as a medical researcher, because she knew that hepatitis C and HIV often went hand in hand. So she started testing samples and found HIV in the plasma selling system. And so she knew that this was a tinderbox just ready to go up in flames because she understood how this virus was spreading. And then it was extremely deadly deadly at this time. So she worked in conjunction with Dr. Gaya, J, who was retired at that point, but was kind of becoming an activist. And together, they started getting the information out to the general public that 1000s and potentially hundreds of 1000s of people had been sickened in this plasma scheme. About a few months after Wang Shu ping blew the whistle, the government shut down the entire plasma system in the country and stopped doing what they were doing because they knew that it was going to kill people. But they then started a pretty massive cover up. So Wang Shu ping the younger doctor who had found the problem and then work to expose it. She stayed in China for a couple more years, but she was threatened. She got beaten up. I mean, it was really dangerous for her. So she very quietly started, she was young, she was in our 30s. At the time, she very quietly started applying for research jobs in the US. And she got hired initially, I believe in Wisconsin, and then she eventually ended up in Salt Lake and she never really, I wouldn't say never, but she was very quiet about it. She kind of understood the risk. She got out she had done this incredible feat of whistleblowing, but no one really knew who she was. Her name was kind of out there, but she didn't do a lot of interviews. Now. Galio J, on the other hand, became extremely high profile. And she was at a pretty severe risk of being arrested. She has said that she was under house arrest couldn't leave her apartment. And so she fled basically in the middle of the night one night with the help of Hillary Clinton and ended up in New York. And she's had she's in her 90s Now, and has written numerous books about the whole thing. Unfortunately, Wang Shu ping passed away. I mean, these two women are rave beyond belief for what they did. But they were absolutely. I mean, you can imagine, just imagine this happening in your city or your town or your neighborhood, the government starts this system, and this system starts killing people. And then suddenly, you're not supposed to talk about it right? In this, you know, being the Chinese government, which is an expert in repressive repressing thing that covering things up, they were incredibly brave, to tell the world what had happened. But they're, I guess, the outcomes of their lives have been? Oh, in a lot of ways, pretty sad.

Joe Cadwell: 15:43

Yeah. And so you, you have first hand knowledge of what it's like to live in China, you have firsthand knowledge of what it's like to have a reliance on these drugs for your health and well being that are derived from plasma, you said China had created a plasma economy and, and that sort of went wrong for them for for a period of time and hard to say where it's at now, but your book and then continues on over to the to the US and we talk about present day, plasma economies, and from what I understand, you know, since 1975, I believe that's the year the World Health Organization has basically said that the the selling of plasma is sort of a taboo to some extent, and put out a guideline saying, hey, you know, countries around the world, probably best not to encourage people to sell their plasma. And five countries from the world said, No, absolutely not. And those are the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Poland and the United States. And so why did did these countries say no to that? Do you think? And what is the current state of the plasma economy? And who's benefiting from it? And who's, who's paying the toll for it?

Kathleen McLaughlin: 16:55

That's such an interesting question. The why. And I have tried to get to that. And I think the why is obvious, but at the same time, kind of difficult to dry out. So let me just start by saying there is plasma true plasma donation where you don't get paid. And you can do that at the Red Cross, and a couple of other places you can donate plasma, without pay, most plasma collected in the United States, this giant pool of plasma that we have is collected by for profit, biomedical companies, multinationals that pay people for their donations, and they gamify the system so that it encourages people to give their plasma as much as possible. So just as let me just tell you a number that is very interesting to me, if you decide to donate plasma in it, you don't need the money. And so it's just for pure altruism, because you want someone like me to have my plasma drugs, you can do so at the Red Cross a maximum of 13 times a year, so that 13 times a year, that's the max that the Red Cross will allow for the health and safety of their donors, right? If you sell plasma at a for profit collection center in the United States, you can do it 104 times a year, twice a week. Correct. So what's going on there? How did we end up with a system where the for profit companies will tell you that it's completely safe to sell your plasma twice a week, whereas the Red Cross who everyone kind of trusts and isn't trying to make a buck off of your plasma will only allow you to do it once a month. There's there's a big gap there. Now, I think how we became this is just in the same way that the United States has allowed the exploitation of lower income people and working people for generations without much notice. I think that the way that we have become the world's biggest supplier of human blood plasma, is that it comes from people primarily who are on the economic margins. And I'm not saying the poorest of the poor, because generally speaking, the poorest of the poor people who are on housed are screened out of the system, you have to have proof of permanent residents that permanent residence in order to sell plasma, but I'm talking about people who are maybe in the working poor also in what we used to think of as the middle class. I have over the course of this reporting met a lot of people who sell plasma to pay for vacations. I've met a lot of people who sell plasma to pay for college or pay for living expenses while in college. So I think that what has happened is this is one of these industries, kind of like the dollar store that has grown up around the economic fault lines in the United States, if that makes sense. So we who are vulnerable, and this industry comes in to take from them.

Joe Cadwell: 20:10

And if I not sure where I got the information from, but I think currently in the US, there's about 900 collection centers, plasma collection centers scattered Yeah, us in the majority of those are in disadvantaged ZIP Code areas.

Kathleen McLaughlin: 20:25

That's right. So I think we're up over 1000. Now the last time I checked, the numbers were over 1000. And if you look at one of the most interesting things to me is I started this project in the United States, by looking at a map, you could get maps of where these centers are located. And you will see clusters of them in places that you know, to be economically disadvantaged. So they're in you look, in Michigan, for example, in Detroit and Flint, in particular, have big concentrations of plasma centers. So Flint has about 75 80,000 people, now their population is less than half of what it used to be, they have six for profit class plasma collection center, in the in the greater Flint area, just for comparison, Missoula, Montana, which is close to where I live, has about the same number of people, maybe a few more, they have one Plasma center. So you can really get an idea of where there are a lot of economically vulnerable people, the biggest concentration of for profit, plasma collection centers in the United States is on the US Mexico border. And that's because there is a huge dependence on Mexican citizens crossing over to sell their plasma in the US. So yeah, you can kind of map out the economic fault lines and the United States by where plasma centers lie. It's really interesting. And I do not, I should tell you, when I, when I entered into this project, I honestly thought I was going to be writing a science book, I thought it was gonna be I thought I would come away with this, like, Oh, here's some science recommendations about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it became very clear right away that no, this is a book about the fragmentation of, or the dissolution of the social safety net for Americans. I mean, what has happened in this country in the last, say, 30 to 40 years with the just the absolute disintegration of the social safety net for people and what has materialized in its place is things like selling plasma.

Joe Cadwell: 22:40

Yeah. And I understand the US accounts for about two thirds of the world's plasma supply. And again, my information, hopefully, is, is on par with yours, or close.

Kathleen McLaughlin: 22:51

Yeah, I mean, it's a huge that is one of the numbers I have seen. And that is, it certainly accounts for a huge amount of it. And so what's interesting is if you travel, and I've had this experience, if you travel, for example, in Europe, and tell people about the paid plasma extraction system in the United States, they'll look at you with horror, like, Oh, my God, what a terrible country allow people to sell their plasma, I can't believe you do that. But the fact is, they rely on our plasma for their drugs. And several of these companies are actually based in Europe. These are not strictly American companies. These are multinationals. And so this is a global industry that knows that America is very bad at protecting citizens with economic vulnerabilities. And so it kind of I hate to use a metaphor like this, but it really, it really comes in it as like a vampire. You know, you see these, you see places that are vulnerable and people who are vulnerable, and it knows how to extract from them.

Joe Cadwell: 23:56

So let's back it up just a bit. You said the average plasma donor is someone, I'll be it in the United States, it seems like someone who is possibly on the lower end of the socio economic scale, but is working middle class is trying to shore up some shortcomings in their financial situation by selling their plasma, they're allowed to do that twice a week, up to 104 times a year. And what what do they what do they actually get? You talked about gamification of selling plasma, but dollars and cents? What does an average How long does it take for someone to give plasma and what is the takeaway? Sure, walk out the door. So

Kathleen McLaughlin: 24:34

for most people, that actual process takes about an hour. And some people it can take longer, it just depends it not to get gory, but sometimes it depends how hard it is to get your vein with the needle. And then for some people, it's just a little bit slower but I would say about an average and we're not counting the time to get to the facility, the potential time waiting in line it can take for some people have described taking Half a day just because they have to get there, they have to stand in line, they have to do the health checks, the actual process takes like 45 minutes to an hour. So if you're doing it twice a week, and this also depends on where you are the city that you're in, I would say, a rough average as you can earn somewhere between 900 and $1,000 a month. So it's not enough to be an income. It's enough to supplement an income and cover the gaps. What I mean by gamification is this. So if you are and people who donate plasma will know all about this, you basically are incentivized by the system to go twice a week forever. So you will get paid more for your second, third, fourth, fifth donation in a month, you will sometimes get a bonus for doing eight donations in a month, you'll earn less money per donation if you go fewer times. And so and this is all on people get, you know, codes and coupons and refer a friend bonuses. I mean, it's very much a system that kind of takes advantage of the Yeah, I mean, people's addiction to games, I guess is what it would be. So, you know, the people that I have spoken to who are frequent longterm plasma donors know exactly how to get the most money out of it. And I would say the probably the average most right or Yeah, the average most you can do right now is about$1,000 a month. But if you're really paying attention to all the bonuses and tricks, and everything else, you can boost it beat on that,

Joe Cadwell: 26:39

right. And I understand these people have to be their health has to be checked at least every four months here in the US.

Kathleen McLaughlin: 26:48

Yeah, they, they, um, the plasma centers are pretty strict about health checks. I mean, every time you go in, they're gonna check your blood pressure, and ask you a long series of questions. One of the big things and this is what I mean, but they're pretty particular, you have to tell them if you've gotten a new tattoo, and if you've gotten a new tattoo, you're disqualified for a certain amount of time. They are extremely cautious. And this is why I said earlier, there, there does not appear to be any risk to donors and what happened in China. So for example, you know, AIDS or HIV are a virus being transmitted through that plasma donation system. That's not something that I would be afraid of, if I were a donor,

Joe Cadwell: 27:31

okay, cross contamination, they're using sterilized needles new to sew out sharing centrifuges. And the plasma itself that is being distributed, I understand now, they, they through freezing and through heat tempering and through detergents, they can clean the plasma and ensure that what they that's going out is clean. So

Kathleen McLaughlin: 27:52

understand very, the risk is almost nil, I would say, of contracting any kind of a virus or disease. I mean, I have had to do the math again, I have had dozens, maybe hundreds of plasma medication infusions at this point, and I absolutely don't worry about the risk of getting a virus. It doesn't really it I don't believe and this is after years and years and years of research, I don't believe there is a risk of contracting virus either through donating or receiving these medications. Okay, to me that the potential risk is different.

Joe Cadwell: 28:29

All right. We'll get to that potential risk in just a second. But so I understand the FDA also oversees these collection centers are these collection centers, the local collection center, whether it's in Flint, Michigan, or Missoula, is that owned by a multinational? Are those privately run,

Kathleen McLaughlin: 28:49

those are owned by the same multinational so for example, Grifols, which is a Spanish company that makes my specific plasma medication. They own hundreds of plasma collection centers all over the United States. And that's usually the typical thing. So you have a company that makes biologic medic medicine, and like CSL, which is based in Australia, that's another one of the major companies that you can, where you can sell your plasma or donate your plasma. So it tends to be the companies making these medications. Also, the plasma collection centers, if that makes sense, you wouldn't find and I would say this people if you want to sell plasma, and you happen to see like a privately owned clinic that you've never heard the name, don't sell your plasma there because they're probably pretty shady.

Joe Cadwell: 29:41

Hey, I forgot to ask, what is the average donor donating as far as quantity? I guess it would, you know, per visit, is it you know, I guess it would depend also on your size and weight depends on

Kathleen McLaughlin: 29:53

your weight. Yeah, it's completely based on weight. And actually, I haven't have to look at the chart again. I don't know off the top above my head. But you do this is an interesting quirk to the system. So you will get a higher compensation if you weigh more, because they're taking more fluid from you. And actually, I tried to talk to one person who was trying to gain weight so they can move into the next category of financial compensation. Yes, yeah. So you it's not a lot more, but you can earn a little bit more money if you're in the next level up.

Joe Cadwell: 30:24

All right. So you said, well, for easy math, you said say we'll just make round numbers $1,000 a month, I go eight times a month, that's roughly 120 is $125, a visit that I get for donating unspecified amount of my plasma? Not necessarily my blood, but my plasma? And I can do that twice a week. So that's, that's pretty good. Now this these companies that extract the plasma, what are they getting? Or what is their compensation? What are they turn around and sell sell it for?

Kathleen McLaughlin: 30:58

I'm laughing because the the number might shock you a little bit. So here's the thing, this is not a one to one at all, because the plasma has to be mixed, it has to be processed it there's a whole proprietary proprietary chemical composition of these plasma drugs, the drug that I take is made from the immune system particles that are removed from other people's plasma. The drug that I take contains particles from 1000s of different plasma donors. So I'm not getting a jack an injection of other people's plasma and getting an injection of a drug. And my drug is the most common drug made from blood plasma, I should, I should tell you that as well. So this is the primary one of the primary uses of other people's plasma. But I get an infusion every couple of months of this drug. And I have to think of the volume of it, it's about a liter and a half of medication. That cost is$13,000. Wow. Yeah. So the user end cost of these drugs is insanely expensive.

Joe Cadwell: 32:08

So $125, out of the donor and $13,000 in into the recipient, somewhere in the middle there as a business. On, on on, I think, if I remember correctly, about a $30 billion a year enterprise in the plasma industry. It's a very valuable business. Yeah, the US being one of the largest contributors, again, along with Germany, Austria, Poland and Czech Republic. And so there's some money, serious money being made. You talked about your own personal risk, and and it's not getting a cross contamination. Virus. But what is what do you see the risk being?

Kathleen McLaughlin: 32:49

My personal risk can be that this has been this has been the thing that has weighed on me for 20 years is that I am dependent on a drug that depends on the exploitation of other people? I think it is. And I'm not saying that everyone who donates ourselves plasma is, you know, a tool or without agency, I think it's the opposite of that. I think that people who do this are incredibly altruistic, because you're giving a part of themselves, when maybe they don't have any money to give, right? But the system depends on exploiting them financially. So I honestly think people should get paid more. That's my whole argument, I guess, in all of this is that, rather than depending on people to donate twice a week, every week, forever, until their health kind of gives out and they're tired of doing it, or they don't need the money anymore, we should have a kinder system that looks at ways that might encourage people to engage in this practice. Beyond just needing the money, or I mean, I think there should be fair compensation. There's I have a chapter in the book about something that happened in New York about 100 years ago, back when blood donation was a one to one process. So back when, if you needed a blood donation in the beginning, you had to have a blood donor on hand in the hospital, right? So they basically basically strap you up to another living human This is before they figured out how to store blood. And so there was a class of people in New York who were professional blood donors. And they were there were some incidents in New York that made blood donors fear that they were about to be exploited for their kindness. So they formed a union and and made it a chapter of the AFL which to me was great. And I mean, I, I would love to see people who sell plasma think in terms of labor in organized labor to protect themselves from potential financial and health exploitation and doing this

Joe Cadwell: 34:58

right I can see that And again, the dependency on drug which is derived from donors, especially, I understand that the plasma, big plasma, if you will, kind of took a bit of a hit during the COVID era, especially here in the US with the Mexico US border being kind of locked down. The ease of supply coming across to the plasma centers was cut short. And I understand that there's, there's been a real decline in the the the amount of plasma that was available to be sent over to it to create messages and medicines. Is that a concern to

Kathleen McLaughlin: 35:37

us? Um, yeah, you know, it's interesting, again, because we have allowed this system to flourish that depends on I don't want to say desperation, but kind of that depends on people needing to do this financially. Right. So the US Mexico border was shut down during COVID. And then there was a massive legal battle over whether or not Mexican citizens could resume crossing over to sell plasma. Now my understanding is right now, the border has reopened for that. So if people want to come in now and sell plasma, they can. But there was a shortage in collections when the border shut down. And in addition to that, a lot of people who lived in the US stopped selling plasma or donating plasma, because during the height of COVID, and I would say before vaccines who wanted to be sitting in a medical setting for an hour with other people, if you didn't need to be right, I mean, I wouldn't have been

Joe Cadwell: 36:37

the set of checks that the government was putting out to kind of hey, exactly,

Kathleen McLaughlin: 36:41

exactly. So my understanding is it wasn't just the border thing had a huge impact. But it was also just COVID generally made people averse to going into plasma centers. And I don't blame them one bit for that. So we have, I mean, I think what COVID Did it expose how precarious this whole system is? And I don't think that's great, either. I mean, this is something that, again, people like me depend on, but it can be shut down that easily supply

Joe Cadwell: 37:10

chain issues, as we all become used to. So do you think there's any any talk of deregulation on a world wide scale, the sort of the World Health Organization's recommendation to not so plasma? reversed,

Kathleen McLaughlin: 37:27

I know that Canada has been having an ongoing conversation about I mean, there is a there are a branch of people in Canada who want to allow the practice of people selling plasma. So I know what's happening in Canada, elsewhere in the world? No, I don't think there is a big push for this because America's doing the job for everyone else. So I think that people don't, I think that other countries aren't necessarily concerned with this, because they don't have this problem within their own borders. So yeah, I know that it's happening in Canada, I have not heard of the conversation happening in other places to kind of loosen up the recommendation or start a paid plasma system elsewhere. But it's, it's primarily, I think, because the US is doing the job for everyone else right now.

Joe Cadwell: 38:17

My guest today is Kathleen McLaughlin, author of blood money, story of life, death and profit inside America's blood industry. Is there anything else you would you think we should add to this?

Kathleen McLaughlin: 38:32

For me, really, the main thing and all of this was I had, I was really shocked to learn how embedded in in the fabric of our country, this has become so from college students to, you know, just kind of ordinary working class and middle class people doing the kinds of jobs that I have done. I mean, I talked to local news reporters who are selling plasma to make ends meet to Mexican citizens Academy and cross the border. I mean, this is something that has been, I think, deliberately hidden from public view and deliberately stigmatized. There's a lot of stigma around people selling plasma. A lot of people don't tell their families they're doing it because it's viewed as kind of weird. And I think that because it is hidden, and it has been stigmatized in a lot of ways most of us don't understand how common is and how it has become a part of our society. So this was the thing that really i think i My eyes were open to in this process of reporting on it in the US I have I've had this really weird experience now where I almost anyone who I told what it what this book is about, they will say Oh, yeah, I used to do that. Or Oh yeah, my daughter cells plasma or you know, my car wasn't does it or, you know, recently I was talking to someone, I was just setting up a book event somewhere. And the person I was talking to said, oh, yeah, when I first moved to town, I did that for a year because I didn't have enough money, you know, to make ends meet. So it is something that when you start talking to people about it, it's but I think that, because we're not very good at listening to working people, we're not very good about talking to people who aren't wealthy, right? We like to idolize wealthy people. It's so it's been hidden. But it's also just become embedded in the fabric of our society. And I didn't expect to find that. I thought it would be a couple of 100,000 people in the US. I don't know the exact number of people who donate or sell plasma. But I'm very confident in saying that millions of Americans, millions of Americans have done this in hard economic times. I just think that it's a it's something we need to talk about more so that people understand how broken our economic safety nets are.

Joe Cadwell: 41:07

Yeah, definitely shines a bright light on the economic disparities here in our country. Kathleen, this has been a fantastic conversation, where can people go to find out more about you and your work?

Kathleen McLaughlin: 41:21

I have on Twitter, my handle is ke MC A. I also have a newsletter at substack with that same handle. And I'm kind of the internet, I guess.

Joe Cadwell: 41:36

All right. Well, again, thank you so much. I really look forward to hopefully talking to you in the future. This is your first book like we talked about. So congratulations on that anyone who's interested in learning more about the plasma industry. Definitely get the blood money in your hands. It's available for sale. Now wherever you buy your favorite books. Thank you again, Kathleen. It's been a real pleasure.

Kathleen McLaughlin: 41:59

Thank you, Joe. This was great. I really appreciate it.

Joe Cadwell: 42:03

I guess today it was Kathleen McLaughlin, author of blood money. To dive deeper into the subject, be sure to check out the show notes. As always, thank you for listening. Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday.

Kathleen McLaughlin: 42:14

Well, I mean, that's kind of it. To me, it's more of an ethical moral dilemma. Do we really want to be a country where this is just a thing that people have to do?

Joe Cadwell: 42:25

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like we're the blood dairy of the world. You know, there just

Kathleen McLaughlin: 42:33

is so many people. Just milking It's so gross. I can't I'm glad. I'd like I don't want to say this and recording but it is honestly just so gross. The number of people who sell plasma who, who compared it to me to being a dairy cow.

Joe Cadwell: 42:52

Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah,

Kathleen McLaughlin: 42:54

it's just like, I mean, that's what it I don't think there is a direct threat to people's lives. I truly don't. I just think it's this moral question of like, Is this who we want to be? Like, can we be better