Alarming return of the pure blood movement

There is a young girl in Ohio with a heart defect that requires repair via open heart surgery. Without the surgery she will likely survive for the next five years, but faces a high risk of death or severe disability from congestive heart failure after that. The surgery can be done with little risk and a high chance of success. But her parents don’t want it done due to a noxious and erroneous belief they hold — that the blood and blood products needed for the surgery must not come from anyone who has received an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19. They maintain, as do a tiny but growing number of Americans, that such blood is dangerous, “unclean” and impure.

The unjustified fear of blood from polluted sources is hardly new to the world of blood transfusion. Purity, even in the face of shortages, has a long and horrible history in health care.

In December 1941, a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Detroit mother named Sylvia Tucker visited her local Red Cross donor center to give blood. But when she arrived, the supervisor turned her away. “Orders from the National Offices,” he explained, “barred Negro blood donors …”

“Shocked” and “grieved,” Tucker left in tears, later penning a famous letter of protest about the incident to then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It took seven more years until African Americans were permitted to donate blood. And it took many decades for gay men to be added to the donor pool.

Blood purity was very important to the leaders of Nazi Germany. According to Hitler, blood purity would ensure the survival of the Aryan race and the ‘1000 Year Reich.’ Laws were introduced to ensure “blood purity” within Germany. Anyone who acted outside these laws was deemed to have committed the crime of 'rassenschande’ — ‘racial pollution.’

The Ohio family opposing transfusion for their daughter is not worrying about race or ethnicity. They, like a small number of Americans influenced by ignorance or fearmongering on social media, have succumbed to a dangerous belief that vaccination somehow infects donated blood with dangerous agents and chemicals. There is no basis for this nonsense. History shows, however, that fear can infect and threaten the blood supply.

Blood for transfusion is almost always pooled from thousands of donors before use. Ill-informed protests like this one will continue unless action is taken to stop entertaining them. Some blood donors may withdraw from a system already suffering severe supply shortages, not wanting to mix their ‘pure’ blood with that of vaccinated neighbors. Montana already has a bill in its state legislature prohibiting blood donation from vaccinated individuals. If allowed to fester, the irrational fear of impure COVID blood from the vaccinated could easily destroy the entire American blood supply.

Organizations such as the American Red Cross, American Society of Hematology, Association for the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies, Department of Health and Human Services, patient groups, and medical societies and associations around the world need to speak out loudly and repeatedly to condemn those who spread unwarranted fear about the safety of the blood supply and bigotry against the vaccinated. The jump from a minority talking of a blood supply rife with vaccine pollution can, as COVID misinformation often has, spread rapidly. Facts must drive who donates blood, how it is tested for safety, and who receives it.

Safe blood is crucial to health care. Blood from vaccinated donors is safe.