If you've read the book, you know that the ONE thing on which the homosexuals, hemophiliacs, CDC, FDA, blood brokers (like the Red Cross) and pharmas could agree in '81 was that prison plasmapheresis simply was too dangerous.
Clinton gets blamed because his prison bleed program was not only run by a crony but shut down THREE times in the 80's for various infractions ranging from selling the right to bleed (by the inmates who supervised ops), failure to destroy tainted product, improper storage, unclean instruments and purposeful destruction of records.
"We've studied this prison question to death" said Clinton as he summarily re-upped his blood buddies upon their third shut-down by the FDA.
Arkansas -- along with Louisiana -- not only were worst-case scenarios of US Prison bleed programs but were in operation into the 1990's (through 1994). This is untenable. Particularly given the fact that Bruce Babbitt (who defended the state on appeal) can tell you prisoners were alleging Hep-C infection from the plasmapheresis programs as early as 1977 in Arizona.
If the Reagan Administration was responsible for anything, it was supporting the presidency of George H. Bush who appointed Elizabeth Dole to head the Red Cross (she "revamped the entire US blood system" during her first "volunteer" year, remember?) and sit tight through two election cycles on the blood scandal breaking wide open in Canada thanks to Justice Horace Kreever's commission findings which traced the tainted plasma to Cummins in Arkansas and Angola in Louisiana.
Pop-control mavens (like George H. Bush whose 1970 "Earth Resources and Population" GOP task force report quoted the American Academy of Sciences: "Either the birth rate must go back down or the death rate must go back up.") may have sat on their Clean Hands but it was Clinton who was up to his elbows in blood money.
Refresh my memory. Since when does the US President get to name the head of the American Red Cross?