Blood drive protests ban on gay male donors
San Francisco Democratic State Sen. Scott Wiener held a blood drive Tuesday to call on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to revoke its ban on donations of blood and plasma from sexually active gay and bisexual men.
The blood drive, dubbed #GiveForAGay, encouraged eligible donors to make an appointment to give blood on behalf of their gay friends. It was held amid a national blood shortage brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
Wiener said he had organized the drive to call attention to the critical need for blood donations, and to criticize the FDA’s “terrible policy.”
“It is irrational, it’s discriminatory and it undermines our ability to get people to donate blood,” Wiener said during the drive at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center. “It’s leaving millions of people out — healthy people who want to donate blood.”
The FDA loosened its rules last week to allow gay and bisexual men to donate if they have been celibate for three months. Under the agency’s previous rules, men had to wait 12 months to donate after having sex with another man. But the agency refused to lift its ban outright.
Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups had already been pushing the agency to lift what they call a homophobic vestige of the AIDS crisis. Those calls have amplified amid the coronavirus outbreak.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who donated blood on Wiener’s behalf, called the FDA’s policy arbitrary and divisive. She said reversing the ban could help save lives if the blood shortage worsens.
“It’s time that we stop letting our country be crippled by 1980 policies that make absolutely no sense,” she said. “We need all hands on deck.”
The Board of Supervisors approved a resolution Tuesday urging the FDA to end its ban. At the blood drive, Supervisor Catherine Stefani donated on behalf of Supervisor Rafael Mandelman.
The FDA has said the coronavirus poses “unprecedented challenges” to the blood supply because social distancing measures and canceled blood drives have reduced donations needed to treat a host of conditions unrelated to the virus.
Eligible donors can still give blood and plasma through the Red Cross by scheduling an appointment online at https:// www.redcrossblood.org/ or by calling 8007332767.