SKEPTICS REQUEST UNVAXXED BLOOD
Fears based on unfounded beliefs
Even as the pandemic abates, some issues are still lingering, with some who need blood transfusions appealing to hospitals and Canada’s blood supplier with the request that they receive blood from unvaccinated donors.
The requests are based on unfounded beliefs about vaccine “tainted” blood that have percolated among skeptics and conspiracy theorists, but they highlight the ongoing tensions over vaccination, even as the world moves into year four of COVID.
The true number of inquiries for “unvaccinated” blood is difficult to pin down. Canadian Blood Services said it has received a limited number, but would not say how many, and when the National Post reached out to half a dozen hospitals and hospital networks, most did not respond to requests to comment.
Still, reports of people refusing blood from vaccinated donors appears to figure in to what some have called a “clean blood” movement, driven by misinformation and some alternative-medicine practitioners. “Pure blood” has become a bio description on dating apps, while Agence France-presse reports that a Swiss naturopath is aiming to establish supplies of “mrnafree” blood, worldwide. Canada is among the countries where Zurich-based George Della Pietra is working to establish a presence.
The fear among those refusing “vaccinated” blood include that mrna-based vaccines can genetically modify humans, that the unvaccinated can get “vaccinated” via a blood transfusion, that the pandemic itself is a political hoax and that people who have chosen to be vaccinated are in some ways inferior.
Stories of people declining transfusions in other countries have sparked bioethical debates in Canada, with some suggesting the requests are, in part, an “unintended consequence” of vaccine mandates — a notion that others have sought to debunk.
Transfusion specialists and the Canadian Blood Services have stressed there is no evidence that transfused blood collected from Covid-vaccinated donors poses any harms to recipients.
But the issue is a sensitive one: Doctors involved in fielding demands for “unvaccinated blood” worry they’ll be targeted by anti-vaccine groups or accused of withholding life-saving therapy if they speak publicly.
In Canada, there’s no deferral period between the time someone is vaccinated with a “non-live” vaccine — which all four currently authorized COVID vaccines are — and when they can donate blood. The U.S. takes a similar stance. There also are no requirements to collect or note a donor’s vaccination status on the label of blood products, meaning it’s not possible to select blood that comes from an unvaccinated donor. What’s more, the majority of Canadians have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, making requests for “unvaxxed blood” operationally unfeasible, the Canadian Blood Services said.
In response, some people have asked to choose their own unvaccinated donor, or to donate blood to a child.
However, so-called directed donations are not only expensive to coordinate, they’re inherently riskier for the recipient, because the blood doesn’t go through the normal screening protocols and processing — if there’s a complication, and the hospital knew the donation wasn’t scientifically justifiable, who’s liable? They’re only granted if there’s a compelling medical reason. Offering directed donations purely based on someone’s vaccine status would also set a dangerous precedent, ethicists have said. Where do you draw the line? Would hospitals have to appease patients refusing blood from certain other donors?
A Toronto hospital and Canadian Blood Services declined a request late last year from a father who wanted to donate his own blood to his young adult son, who needed surgery because of a slow-growing tumour in his brain. Fluid in his skull was building and putting pressure on his brain. The father said his son, who was in a coma, would not want to be transfused with blood from a donor who had received a COVID vaccine, and that, if any blood should be needed, the father argued, he should be the donor.
It’s not the only instance of such an attempt in Canada.
In October, a Calgary obstetrician tweeted, as the CBC first reported, that a woman scheduled for a caesarean section said she would refuse blood from a donor who had been vaccinated. Other doctors in southern Alberta reported similar requests.
Elsewhere in December, in a case that drew global media attention, New Zealand’s High Court took temporary custody of a six-month-old baby who required surgery for a heart defect, but whose parents had demanded he not receive a transfusion from a COVID-19 MRNA vaccinated blood donor. Calls for “unvaxxed” blood appears to be exclusively related to mrnabased vaccines, because of unfounded beliefs people somehow become genetically modified, or that the shots are being used to monitor and “control” people.
Yet these fears are not backed up by science.
In the two years blood from vaccinated donors has been used in blood transfusions, “we’ve seen no evidence of any kind of safety concern,” Dr. Roy Silverstein, chair of medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, told the Factcheck.org website.
The MRNA vaccines contain genetic material used to prompt cells to make a protein, or a piece of a protein, that triggers an immune response. There’s no reason why blood would become a mechanism for passively causing that response in someone else, doctors have said.
Because the MRNA doesn’t enter the nucleus where DNA resides, it can’t be converted into DNA, or modify DNA, infectious diseases specialists have explained. This is one of the false fears motivating anti-vaccine skeptics.
It also degrades quickly. “The nucleic acid particles are very unstable and break down very quickly after they are translated into proteins,” said Dr. Davinder Sidhu, who leads the division of transfusion and transplant medicine for southern Alberta.
Bioethicist Maxwell Smith, associate director of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University, doesn’t agree that the “bizarre” instances of people requesting blood from unvaccinated donors has ties to, or is an unforeseen consequence of, COVID mandates or vaccine policies. Misinformation about the shots predated any mandate, he pointed out.
He doubts appeals for “unvaxxed” blood will become a trend. Sidhu said requests have, in fact, fallen off since the fall, that the issue “seems to be fading a bit” now that COVID mandates have been lifted and people are more preoccupied with issues like rising inflation and getting access to health care.
WE’VE SEEN NO EVIDENCE OF ANY KIND OF SAFETY CONCERN.