Free Republic

Are there big nationwide shortages on blood lately? I've been getting hounded by the blood bank to donate more than I've ever seen. If so, I wonder if this is vaccine related, is there a preference for blood from unvaccinated people?

When nurses from Blood Bank of the Redwoods set up their needles, blood machines and cartons of high-fructose juice at Sonoma State University last week, 94 students, faculty and staff members donated blood. Math professor Rick Luttmann was not one of them. He was ineligible, he said, because of a federal Food and Drug Administration ban on blood donations from men who had had sex with men. A ban that he said amounts to unlawful discrimination. Blood drives are the newest battleground for SSU faculty members who, led by Luttmann, are out to purge organizations on the 8,500-student campus they...

Unnecessary regulations are making blood banks run dry. If you walked into a blood donation center before the HIV crisis, you would have been asked 15 quick questions, then either accepted as a donor or not. Today those questions have burgeoned to almost 50, and the list continues to grow. The extra caution stems from a colossal error that blood bank officials made two decades ago, when they ignored the early warning signs of HIV and failed to implement appropriate screening and cleaning procedures. As a result, America’s blood supply became contaminated and 20,000 people were infected with the deadly...