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It’s Not A %, It’s Humans

Wow. How exactly would “directed donor blood orders jeopardize 99.9% of the blood provided to the hospitals today when it’s been a common practice for decades?

Fact: During the 1980’s and 1990’s, it was a standard pre-surgery practice to ask the patient if they wanted to use directed donor blood. The blood industry is a lucrative multibillion dollar industry, and the United States supplies more than 70% of the world’s blood products. They also profitably sell blood to the pharmaceutical industry (there are many products made with human blood components) and to research organizations. The reality is that when a directed donor bag of blood is bar coded for a specific patient, it belongs to that patient. It cannot be cherry picked and sold for a higher dollar amount elsewhere because of something unique, rare, or special found in that bag of blood. An estimated 10-15% of the multibillion-dollar biologics leg of the pharmaceutical industry is reliant upon human blood cells for production. For what it’s worth, altruistically donated blood which is sold to the pharmaceutical industry for the production of biologics will (on average) cost the consumer patient anywhere from about $30K a year up to $1Million. (That’s a pretty great business model!) We would like to ask, are the objections to SB125 reflective of patient care or profit care?

Thank you @SenatorBobHall for fighting for the rights of all Texans!