Hmm. I’m just entering my 60s now, I’m usually down in the Monterey* area most weekends. $8,000 isn’t a whole lotta money (I’m not tres comas, but I’m dos comas). Hmmm…
*This is where the two-year human trial is taking place.
Yes, but they have to be virgins. They are becoming a rare commodity.
That’s why I have a farm where I raise my own.
I’ve seen your biopic. 
The ‘blood shortage’ would be relieved in an instant if the USA would accept gay men as blood donors, like Canada & the rest of the western world does. But the prejudices of the Red Cross and government bureaucrats prevent that. So if patients are missing out on blood transfusions, put the blame where it belongs – on these bigots.
Canada has the same one year after male to make sexual contact deferral as the US. It’s not an uncommon time frame in the western world. Germany still has a lifetime ban. Worldwide donation deferral statuses on Wikipedia
Since gay men are maybe 2.5% of the population, unless they are disproportionately likely to donate blood, it seems that their contributions would not be a huge difference maker.
It seems unlikely to me that the blood supply for this kind of treatment would significantly overlap with the donated blood supply.
People who give blood now do it without material compensation, generally because they believe they are helping those in need. Are those people going to decide to give blood to rich people instead?
People who want to give blood and be paid for it currently have no way to do so legally.
I’m sure there’s some overlap, people who donate as do-gooders, but would rather get paid. But it doesn’t seem like it’s a lot.
The rich already have a far better late life outcome than is available to the rest of us. This seems kinda like more of the same (if it even works).
This seems categorically different than, say, selling organs. You can make more blood. If we’re going to allow poor people to sell their labor, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to let them sell body products that they can regenerate.
There is a real study of this in the works, IIRC.
The study cited in the OP seems “scammy” to me. At the very least, it’s skirting around FDA regulations. It seems to be a way of selling the product before it’s proven, by pretending it’s a study.
I wonder what IRB approved it. I have long wondered if independent IRB’s can be fully trusted*, or if there is a component of “pay to play” (paying enough for approval of a sketchy study).
*I should say that I serve on an IRB, and while I wonder and worry, I have not yet seen anything fishy or sketchy in any of the paperwork I’ve seen. However, there are steps being taken to require multicenter studies to answer to one IRB alone in the future. If these are for-profit IRB’s, one wonders what stories will come out over time…
The OP talks about this costing $8,000 for every procedure. But in the episode of the sitcom Silicon Valley, the billionaire doing this had an arrangement with a young guy to do direct transfusions. I would imagine if you made the deal directly with a healthy young person, you could do this more cheaply (although you could do this very often with a single individual).
Its not that simple. Its not the whole blood; its the plasma. That person would need medical personnel to draw the blood; match it to the donor; make sure it is clean, separate it and inject it into the donee. You would need a center to do this.
In the sitcom (which admittedly probably simplified things for the humor), it was a simple person-to-person transfusion, I think of whole blood. And I assume the people charging $8,000 for each procedure is extensively vetting the donors and testing the blood. So for the right customer, perhaps $8,000 every time is worth it.
If this procedure leads to the transfusion of some amount of money from the very-rich to the less-rich, I’m all for it!
Won’t happen. The very rich will call it ‘medical expenses’ and deduct it from their taxes, so the rest of us will have to pay more taxes to make up for that.
Okay. Clear that this is if not a scam, very scammy.
But as for diverting needed blood? They use the plasma. My WAG is that there is less medical need for plasma than there is for other blood components and that a fair amount collected along the way with platelet collections never gets used, at least for patients.
Plasma that is collected for plasma (and sometimes paid for, with the RBCs put back into the donor) is generally used for the pharmaceuticals industry. So it may divert from that use but hey I don’t feel sorry for the drug companies.
I would call harvesting the blood of the poor closer to the dystopian society end of the spectrum than healthy free-market capitalism.
Really? We already harvest the sweat of the poor, when we employ them to do things we’re not willing to do. And we even harvest the lives of the poor when poor boys and girls are sent off to fight and die in foreign wars and the sons and daughters of the rich are not. This seems no different to me.
Which are both things that many people have found ethically troubling both in history and today. I don’t know why you think because a group is used as a resource in one way, it’s acceptable to use them as a resource in another.
Is it acceptable that I live in a crappy one-bedroom apartment while others have houses in multiple cities so that one might only be occupied for a week or so each year?
On the one hand, I see that. Obviously, the optics aren’t good.
On the other, I’d personally much rather sit around and generate blood than do backbreaking physical labor.