In honor of the reversal of the ban on gay men donating blood, a former policy advisor under President Joe Biden will roll up his sleeve and give what he has to offer.
Dr. Robert Goldstein, former senior policy advisor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2021 to 2023 and a gay man, will donate blood Tuesday alongside his old mentor Dr Rochelle Walensky, former director of the CDC.
Dr Goldstein, now the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, has never been able to make the life-saving donation because he is a gay man, and up until May 2023, was forbidden from giving blood under a US Food and Drug Administration rule.
However, new rules announced by the FDA in May recently went into effect and now allow blood donations from millions of gay, bisexual and other men who have sex men.
Goldstein and Walensky will mark the occasion by donating blood together at the Red Cross Dedham Donation Center in Dedham, Massachusetts.
Dr Robert Goldstein (left) and Dr Rochelle Walensky (right) have been advocates for changing the FDA’s blood donation rules for years
Dr Robert Goldstein and Dr Rochelle Walensky will donate blood together at the Red Cross Dedham Donation Center in Dedham, Massachusetts, pictured above
The pair have been advocates for changing the FDA’s rules for years and in 2017 published a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine in the wake of the deadly shooting at Pulse nightclub in Florida calling for action on the rule.
In June 2016, a gunman shot and killed 49 people and wounded 53 more when he open fired in the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
The doctors’ paper specifically named the shooting as an impetus to propose changing the FDA’s rules. While thousands of people waited in hours-long lines to donate blood for injured victims of the Pulse shooting, a tragedy that specifically targeted the LGBTQ+ community, ‘one group was notably absent from these donation lines’, the paper stated, referring to men who have sex with men.
‘This prohibition was, of course, not the tragedy that day, but the added insult that gay and bisexual men were unable to offer this measure of help to their community was deeply felt’, the paper continued.
One week after the shooting, 24 US senators wrote to the FDA asking the agency to revisit the policy that forbid gay men from donating blood.
Goldstein and Walensky’s paper highlighted the ‘flawed logic’ of the ban prohibiting a gay man with only one partner who repeatedly has tested negative for HIV, but allowing a heterosexual man who had recently had unprotected sex with women, any of whom could have HIV or AIDS.
In 2020, the FDA updated its guidance to allow men who have sex with men to donate blood only if they abstained from sex with men in the previous three months.
In May, those rules were updated once again. Now, all donors are asked the same questions, regardless of gender, sex or sexuality and no one group of people is banned from being a donor.
The new rules ask anyone who has had new or multiple sexual partners in the previous three months and who has also had anal sex in that timeframe to wait three months to donate blood.
Before the updated guidelines, federal limitations on who could donate blood were once based on dated science from 1985 to protect America’s blood supply from HIV, a disease that was still a mystery at the time.
When the FDA first enacted the ban during the AIDS epidemic, next-to-nothing was known about HIV and AIDS, and prior to 1985, there was no screening test for the diseases. The first treatment was not available until 1987.
Scientists did not know yet the diseases were spread through blood and sex and in the 1970s and 1980s, the US blood supply had been the source of thousands of HIV infections.
Now, however, the HIV screening test is just shy of 100 percent and every blood donation is tested for HIV.
In neighboring Canada, guidelines were changed one year ago and questions and criteria specifically for men who have sex with men were removed in September 2022. All donors are now asked if they have had new and/or multiple sexual partners or have had anal sex in the last three months. If they have, they are required to wait three months to donate.
Across the pond in the United Kingdom, similar blood donation rules apply. The country’s National Health Service asks people who have had anal sex with a new partner in the last three months to wait three months before donating.
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