Robert, who is looking better than ever these days wow what great hair, finishes telling Ben Bowlin the harrowing story of how the U.S. murdered thousands of our nation's closest friends and poisoned incarcerated people for a modest payout.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What happened to the Arkansas prison blood donation program?
However, as I stated in the last episode, all of these are being mixed with tens of thousands of other blood donations. And so these 38-ish pints-ish of tainted blood can wind up being turned into medicine for tens of thousands of people, right? Because any given dose of the plasma being given to hemophiliacs as factor VIII would be made from the blood of as many as 60,000 donors.
And just one tainted donor can spoil the batch. So that's great. So from just 38 pints of donated blood, At least 40,000 doses of dangerous tainted medicine were made and shipped overseas. At least. Probably significantly more than that. Many made their way into the hands of hemophiliacs who required regular injections of factor VIII.
In 1985, the same year that Clinton's state cops cleared the company of most wrongdoing, a UK hemophiliac sufferer named Peter Longstaff tested positive for HIV. Now, because of the way this all works, we don't know that Peter's tainted plasma came from Arkansas prison inmates, right? Because you can't. They're just mixing it.
They're not keeping track of – here's every individual whose blood is in this batch of Factor VIII, right? Right. But he had been taking blood products, including factor VIII and factor IV, since the 70s. And by then, Arkansas was a huge part of the U.S. blood economy. And the odds that blood from Cummins' prison made it into his body are about 100%, right?
Just given the way things worked at that time. His brother also suffered from hemophilia. And his brother, Stephen Longstaff, would be infected in 1986 and became one of the first people to die of AIDS in the U.K.,
Given the hysteria at the time, this meant not just that the Longstaffs weren't just dealing with the fact that two of, you know, both of their sons had gotten sick and, you know, in 86, one of them died. But it meant that they also became the targets of mob panic. Per The Guardian, during Stephen's final days in hospital, the windows had to be blacked out to prevent people taking pictures.
On the day of the funeral, the family house was daubed with paint, which read, AIDS, get out of here. It was devastating to the family, his mother said. Pete himself recalled being rescued from his house by his GP and the police because there was a mob outside trying to get him because he had HIV.
So when we talk about how many people are getting sick, it's not just that they're getting a deadly or potentially deadly disease that changes or ends their life. It's also they're dealing with this kind of shit because that is where the culture is at the time.
The secondary infection of a mass outbreak of dickishness. So we could say then –
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Chapter 2: How were tainted blood products distributed internationally?
Right. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. And this is how the paper concludes. HMA originally may have diverted the Department of Correction payments to support acquiring plasma centers or to other purposes that may well warrant further inquiry. In any event, it was early in the five-year contract period that HMA established a pattern of contract shortfalls, and the ADC accepted them.
For HMA, this must all be viewed as profit-motivated business decision-making at best. At worst, it calls for further inquiry. So just like so many crimes are going on here. Even though it has concluded this again, it's just blaming HMA. So the people running the prison system still want to make money off of blood.
So the Arkansas Department of Corrections makes a deal with a new company, Pine Bluff Biological Products, a for-profit business. And obviously one that's not going to continue the same problems. These guys are finally going to be ethical.
Finally. Finally. On the up and up.
On the up and up.
Someone doing blood money the right way.
Yes, exactly. Ethical. Just like the ethical blood diamonds that I wear in my all diamond chiffon. I don't know what a chiffon is.
But, you know, yours is diamond encrusted. That's the important part of the story.
Yes. And they're not blood diamonds. They're blood plasma diamonds, which is much more ethical.
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Chapter 3: What was the impact of the contaminated blood scandal on Canadian citizens?
Chapter 4: How did the prison system profit from blood donations?
Yeah. To exclude such plasma from manufacture of our coagulation product would only be a sopper gratuity to the gay rights movement and would presage further pressure to exclude plasma collected from the Mexican border and the paid donor.
Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Will someone think about- We'll make less money if we have to use blood that isn't taken coercively by people who have an incentive to lie about whether or not they're sick. And again, when I talk about there being a lot more money, like what PVP is making is the initial money for selling this plasma, right?
And both the plasma and the whole blood that's coming in through these donation programs are worth a shitload more once you spin them out into the different blood factors, right? So there's a whole higher level of profit that these companies like Cutter are making, right? Likewise, the US has said, we're not using this stuff domestically for medicine.
And likewise, our foreign friends in the UK and Canada don't allow blood from prison inmates to be used in medicine. But a system had been devised to ensure plausible deniability. The blood that came out of Cummins and other donor programs in the US was sold to Continental Pharmacrino in Montreal. And this major blood broker resells the whole blood in plasma all around the world.
And it also sells to a Toronto-based company, Connett Laboratories, who effectively played the role of blood launderer and sent this tainted blood to the Canadian Red Cross. The laundering process was so effective that, as Sophia Chase writes, in at least one case, the blood was sent back to the United States. So we are also using tainted blood in the U.S.
from inmates, even though we're not supposed to be, because it's being sold to Canada and then sold back to us. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What were the consequences of using inmate blood for medicine?
Chapter 6: Why were prisoners incentivized to donate blood?
Basically, people who were running the Department of Corrections went to rich entrepreneur friends of theirs and were like, here's what you need to do to set up a company to make this work, right? Mm-hmm. Now, I know what you're asking now. How much money was in this business for the prison system?
Oh, wait, wait, wait. Let me do it. Hey, Robert, how much money was in this for the prison system? Hmm.
Chapter 7: What role did insurance companies play in the plasma program?
The answer is less than you'd think. Here's the Arkansas Times. According to Robert's records, PBBP reported collecting an average of 960 units of plasma a week in fiscal year 1986, calculated a conserving selling rate of $50 a unit that volume of plasma grows to approximately 2.5 million that year. According to PBBP's contract, the ADC was to receive $5 for every unit of plasma collected.
So here's how the numbers looked in a year when the median income in Arkansas was half of what it is today and when the scourge of contaminated blood products was being felt around the world. Now, that sounds weirdly small for this. First off, this is not all the money that's coming in through the program. But second...
What's happening here is the state and the prisons are getting a little bit of this money. And most of that prisoner money is also going back into the Department of Corrections because they're using it to buy things from the prisons. Most of the money is going to PBBP.
And again, this is a company that has been set up specifically to interface with the Department of Corrections, generally by people who had relationships with people in Arkansas government who were responsible for making these calls. So they basically created a free company to siphon off money from the prisons, right? That's kind of what's happened here.
Yeah, that's the question. I think all of us hearing this are going to be asking naturally, is this a cutout? Is this like a proxy to move or sluice some money through?
That's an element of what is going on. There's also serious debates. As to these numbers, this is what the Arkansas Times suggests. There's a – Sophia Chase wrote for the William and Mary Business Law Review that the value of a unit of blood to the prison was about $100, and the prison kept half of that as opposed to like $5 per unit. So there may have been a lot more going into the system.
The fact that the money on this is so unclear in its precise details is one of the things that's shady. Yeah. Now – Even if, let's say it's about $2 million that PBBP is grossing. Now, that's gross not yet net, but they effectively have almost no costs because they don't build their own facilities. They are using a plasmapheresis center built into Cummins Prison for free.
That's part of the contract. The Department of Corrections handles all utilities and all janitorial work. And it's also guards who are working, reaching out to prisoners to get them to sign on to the program and busing them to Cummins. And it's still a lot of inmates doing the work. So really, PPVP is just skimming $2 million out of this program and handing it to some people.
Who have connections to folks who are, you know, close to the ADC, right? Yeah. So as far as I can tell, all PBBP, the company did was sell blood without checking to make sure it was safe and pocketed the money. On paper, they were supposed to assume liability for all plasma products produced through this and ensure they provided staff to handle the draw and
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Chapter 8: What was the aftermath of the blood contamination crisis?
Oh, there's so much money laundering blood. Oh, man. Do you ever think about that? Mm hmm. I do. I do. You know, I have a shitload of blood in my house. I keep it.
People always say that.
Yeah, I keep it in my basement. I don't know if it needs to be refrigerated, but, you know, make me an offer, folks. If you need a shitload of blood, I got it. Cool.
Store is cool blood stored in a dark place.
Cool zone is getting into the blood business. So you're legally not allowed to ask me where it came from.
It's illegal for you guys to ask Robert that it's important.
It's so important we can't know.
Yeah. It's also important to realize that the fewer questions you ask, the bigger of a price break you get.
That's right.
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