While we are on the subject of vaccinations, another article brings up the idea - and the problem - of requests for unvaccinated blood for blood transfusions.
Yes, it seems that some people gravely ill in hospital are picky about where their lifesaving blood donation comes from. And, as happened after the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the COVID-19 pandemic, and all the misinformation swirling around it, has led to a huge increase in requests for "directed donations".
In the 1980s, this manifested as people requesting blood donations from friends and relatives, because they thought they couldn't trust the general anonymous blood supply. Ironically, as it happens, blood donations from family members actually turns out to pose increased risks for blood safety, but that was not known back then.
Today, directed donations requests mainly stem from misinformation about the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations. Predictably, it has been proven repeatedly that "vaccination status has no impact on blood safety", but you try explaining that to a paranoid conspiracy theorist who believes everything they read on X.
Meanwhile, hospitals and blood transfusion suppliers still have to have these kinds of blood donations on hand in case they are requested. Every directed unit of blood needs to be collected, labelled and stored separately, and may have to be discarded if not used in time. Some transfusion patients have almost died due to the difficulty in getting such directed donations to the hospital in time, despite other (perfectly good) blood being easily and quickly available.
This is just one more example of the way in which medical and political misinformation impacts the health sector, and one I must admit I'd never even thought about.
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