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Sarah Ellis, a lesbian who is the president and CEO of GLAAD, tweeted a link to a petition March 19 asking the FDA to change its guidance. The American Medical Association pushed the FDA to modify the policy in the mid-2010s. Gay current Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell) has also advocated for the ban to be lifted. Locally, gay former state Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) pushed for changes to the federal policy for years. The FDA's new rules do prohibit men who have had sex with men in the past year from donating blood, as well as any of their female partners.įor years many organizations and gay advocates have been calling for the ban to be removed in light of the changes that have occurred since the early 1980s.
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HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, had not yet been identified and so there was no way to screen for it in blood donations - which put people in need of blood transfusions at risk.īut after the HIV antibody test was widely proliferated, the ban did not change in a meaningful way until 2015, during the Obama administration. The FDA instituted a lifetime ban on men who have had sex with men donating blood in 1983, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. "I'd love to go and give blood but as has always been the case I'm prohibited." "There is a severe national blood shortage," Wiener said in a phone interview with the Bay Area Reporter March 23. Food and Drug Administration to lift its ban on men who have had sex with men in the past year from giving blood. Wiener Calls for End of Gay Blood Ban Amid Coronavirus-era Shortages - (Bay Area Reporter - Mar 24)Ĭiting worries of shortages in the nation's blood supply as American life comes to a standstill in response to the novel coronavirus, gay state Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) is calling for the U.S.