Part Two: How Tainted Human Blood Became A Major U.S. Export

don't want you to know. Podcast Maven Impresario. Uh yeah, how are you doing? How are you feeling?

of blood that's tainted doesn't sound like a lot maybe. 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 thirty eight 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 eight would be made from the blood of as many as sixty

thousand donors, and just one tainted donor can spoil the batch. So that's great. So from just thirty eight pints of donated blood, at least four one thousand 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 eight. In nineteen eighty five, the same year as Clinton that Clinton's state cops cleared the company of most wrongdoing, a

UK hemophilias sufferer named Peter Longstaff tested positive for HIV. Now, because 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 just mixing it. They're not keeping track of here's every individual whose blood is in this batch of factor eight, right, But he'd been taking blood products, including factor eight and factor four since the seventies, and by then Arkansas was a huge part of the US blood economy, and the odds that blood from Cummen's Prison made it into his body are about one hundred percent, right,

just given the way things worked at that time. His brother also suffered from hemophelia, and his brother, Stephen long Staff, would be infected in nineteen eighty six and became one of the first people to die of AIDS in the UK. Given the hysteria at the time, this meant not just that the long Staffs weren't just dealing with the fact that two of you know, both of their sons had gotten sick and you know, in eighty six 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 in their life. It's also they're dealing with this kind of shit because that is where the culture is at the time, you know.

liability was about a quarter of a million dollars. Now, we don't know how much money HMA was making off of this program, in part because they weren't really required to like let people like some of the regulations about this are like, you don't really need to say in the sense that most companies do, but at least a couple of million dollars a year is probably a fair guest based on how like what the company that takes

over for them is going to make Now. The state police investigation largely cleared the department of any serious wrongdoing in their plasma problem. HMA was eventually given the go

ahead to continue operating it with new safeguards in place. Thankfully, the growing panic over HIV and the news of what had happened to the long staffs in the UK prompted some re examination and even though they were allowed to continue in like eighty four or eighty five doing this this plasma do Nation program, in the summer of nineteen eighty six, a hero emerged and unfortunately in this case, the hero is an insurance company, but like HMA's insurance company,

after they after they looked into the evidence, was like, oh, absolutely not, no, you people are going to get us fucked, Like you're so reckless, we're dropping your asses right. This meant that the Arkansaw prison plasma donation program was again forced to shut down, and this is going to lead to some of the most i mean, less irresponsible actions

than we've had so far. So one of the things that happens once HMA gets shut down by their insurer, the prison board, in which the guy we heard from last episode, Clinton Aide Bobby Roberts, is a member of the board. They actually they're like, they they met, come to the conclusion that, like that state police investigation might have been shit, and they hire an outside organization to do a better version of the internal investigation into what

had happened. Now, the group they picked was the Institute for Law and Policy Planning from Berkeley, California, which is a lot better than having the state police do it. But the subject of the investigation wasn't the plasma donation program itself. It was just the behavior of HMA. So part of what they're doing here is good that we get this info, but part of what they're doing is like, well, we don't want to be like shitting on the prison system.

We want to make this company, who we already can't work with anymore, into a scapegoat.

further inquiry. So just like so many crimes are going on here. Yeah, now, 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 Apartment 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, up.

company to like make this work. Right now, I know what you're asking now, how much money was in this business for the prison system?

every unit of plasma collected. So here's how the numbers looked in a year when the media and income in Arkansas was half of what it is today and when the scury contaminated blood products was being felt around the world. Of PBBPS two point five million in annual gross sales, three hundred and fifty thousand went to pay inmates their

seven dollars a unit fees. The State of Arkansas collected two hundred and forty nine thousand, six hundred dollars for prison operations, and PBBP had gross revenues of almost one point nine million. Now that sounds weirdly small for those 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, you know, 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.

been a lot more going into the system. The fact that the money on this is so unclear in its precise details. As one of the things that's shady. Yeah, death. Now, even if let's say it's about two million dollars 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 plasma Faresis 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 onto the program and busting them to Cummins. And it's still a lot of inmates doing the work. So really PBBP is just skimming two million dollars out of this program and handing it to some people who have connections to folks who are

close to the ADC. Right, so, as far as I can tell, all pp 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 that those staff were licensed professionals who would check the product. But the ADEC also kept giving them inmates to do blood draws and other work that, by the text of the contract,

professional PBBP employees ought only to have been doing. Roberts described the PBBP looking at the inmates as quote, sort of as little cows right here the subscription A lot that they're like, this is these are yeah, these are animals that we are mining for the products of their body. Now, by nineteen eighty six, when PBBP starts, we are four years past the point where the US has essentially soft banned the use of domestic inmate blood. However, it continues

to be used for export products. Cutter Laboratories, which is one of the companies involved in the nuts and bolts parts of turning whole blood into like blood products, publishes an internal memo around this time that highlights the attitude many in the industry had to the idea of excluding prison plasma donations. There are no data to support the emotional arguments that prison plasma collected from adequately screened prisoners

is bad. To exclude such plasma from manufacture of our coagulation product would only be a soop or a gratuity to the gay rights movement, and would presage further pressure to exclude plays asma collected from the Mexican border and the paid donor.

once you spin them out into the different blood factors. Right, So this there's a whole higher level of profit that these companies like Cutter are making. Right. Likewise, you know, the US has said we're not using this stuff domestically for medicine, and like it was, 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 Pharmachrino 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, Connet 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, and at least one case, the blood was sent back to the United States. So we are also using tainted blood in the US from inmates, even though we're not supposed to be, because it's being sold to Canada and then sold back to US sometimes like.

that records are regularly falsified and destroyed. Earlier in these episodes, we quoted from Clinton friend and prison board member Bobby Bobby Roberts. He's been something of a whistleblower about the program, but just to an extent. When the FDA published a study alleging that prison plasma was likelier to be tainted with blood than plasma donated elsewhere, Roberts told reporters from

the Arkansas Times this, I deny the premise. I disagree that prison plasma blood was more dangerous than what was coming out of the for profit centers. In the free world out there, anybody could bleed anybody, and like, but the problem isn't everyone has blood. The problem is that it's not being checked. And there's a lot of incentives to lie when you're sick, when you have no other way of making money because you're in prison.

You had prisoners bribing prisoners, prisoners bribing officials, officials offering certain deals for them to bleed for extra money or drugs. Sorels himself passed away from hepatitis CEE shortly after the interview. He became infected with this disease during his time at Cummen's Prison, and because of the previous scandals under hm May, there are more outside investigations into the plasma program after

this point. A few years after PBBP takes over, an FDA inspector reports them for poor screening procedures and record keeping. The prison officials who managed the program for PBBP were also accused of using prison guards to recruit inmates. Despite this, in an interview with a local reporter, prison medical director John Bias, who is like you know, like the medical director of the prison right, said this, we planned to stick with the plasma program to the last day, to

the last drop we're able to sell. Wow, Okay, Well, why given all of the bad stuff.

body count. Best as we can tell, more than a thousand Canadian hemophiliacs were dosed with tainted blood from Cummins prison alone. During this timeframe, forty two thousand Canadians were infected with hepatitis C and thousands more with HIV through tainted plasma, often including plasma imported from Cummins. Current estimates expect about seven thousand totals of Canadian citizens from contaminated blood sold by the US during this period about two nine to elevens A little more and to be.

prison inmates. Right. They trace a lot of it back to Cumments Connaught Laboratories, which is the Canadian company that's like making the blood product. Was obviously proven negligent in all this, largely because they had avoided checking any of the plasma collection sites themselves and had relied on FDA records,

which were also deficient. Subsequent investigations showed that it's a little bit like if you've heard the story of like the Rust shooting, right, where like the first ad assistant director was supposed to check the gun to see if it was empty. Alongside the armor was also supposed to check the gun to see if it was empty, and the first ad didn't really do a check because he assumed the armorer had done it right and the armor had not done it. It's like that, right, like Connaught was,

just like the FDA's probably got it. We don't need to spend any money checking, and like they really did, the FDA didn't have it.

blood sales. There have been attempts at lawsuits over this, but the difficulties of carrying out such a suit cross border and mostly style me the efforts of Canadian humophiliacs to get justice. As I discussed earlier, a good deal of the tainted blood from the US also went to Great Britain, where it helped cause what Lord Robert Winston described as the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS. Oh, all thanks to our American our American friends.

of those were also infected with HIV. About two thousand have died at this point right also, many of them spread diseases to partners and children. Will never fully have an understanding of the exact cons but at least two thousand dead. And again there were, like, you know, investigations into this as well. Quote it ultimately determined that a a significant burden of responsibility for tainted blood provided at

British hemotheliacs rests on American suppliers of factor eight concentrate. Now, due to the way things were done at the time, it was not possible to determine how many of those deaths were directly linked to Commons prison. Again, there have been changes in how stuff is reported to try and make it easier to trace back tainted blood, but that didn't exist at the time. We know at least three, right,

so we know what was happening. It's got to be thousands more than that, right, because it's incredibly hard to actually trace this right, in part because one of the things they found when they realized how many British people had gotten HIV and hepatitis and we're dying, they found that most of the records for blood transactions to import blood into the UK had been shredded in the early nineteen nineties. Surely oop, oops, surely nothing shady their.

they just didn't have enough. And the US was considered the gold standard planet wide for blood distribution because no one else could gather and disseminate anywhere. Again, seventy percent of the blood products worldwide coming from the US. No one else close, So everyone is just like they must

have this shit figured out right. No, but yeah, But because our system was the largest by far, everyone relied on it and it became the global standard, and other national healthcare agencies and companies just sort of assumed that US regulators had our shit together because the only other option was to not have enough blood. Now that's the bulk of this story. But before we close out here,

I should talk about something. So there is apparently an exceptional documentary made about all this, called Factor eight, The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal. It is made by Kelly Dudah, a filmmaker and investigative journalist who won a Peabody Award in two thousand and three for a Japanese documentary about the cover up by the government of a HEPC epidemic.

She spent eight years researching and five years filming this movie, which prompted an international response, and even she gets called into a criminal trial in Enables for a company accused of selling tainted blood products to Italian citizens. It's supposed to be excellent. I haven't seen it, and I wanted to. It is not available anywhere online that I can find. When you look on like reddits and stuff, it will be all it's always blamed on the Clintons, right that

they stop this documentary from getting out. I know that Duda has alleged she received like harassment and stuff while she was making the documentary that said, when you talk about like the bad things the Clintons did, this is especially Bill, an incredibly powerful man who was involved in a lot of shady stuff. There's also a whole industry of right wing content dedicated to like lying about shit,

including like the Clinton murder list and stuff. It's just nonsense, right, So it's difficult to parse a lot of stuff out now. There is no doubting that Bill Clinton deserves a massive degree of blame for the Arkansas blood scandal because he was the governor and because he put people who were close to him directly in positions to manage the program.

No argument period that he does not deserve a meaningful amount of blame for this, right, But a lot of these other allegations, right, like the fact that are the Clintons locking down access? Have they used their influence? It's like, I mean, it's not a powerful people do that with documentaries. But also a lot of the time I'm doing episodes, I found out there's a twenty year old documentary about it, and I can't find that documentary because it's not on streaming.

That just happens with media. So is the likeliest thing the Clinton's locked, I don't. I have no evidence of that, right, I've had this happen to a bunch of documentaries over the years that said I would love to see this documentary. So if you've got it, hit us up, and I

don't know, someone put it on fucking streaming. Now. The most credible allegations that I've heard when it comes to, like, you know, the corruption here, is that money from this blood program was used to provide positions to people as political favors where they could profit while doing very little. And it's certainly true that the state Department of Corrections

doesn't make a ton from the blood program right. However, other people in and around the state government make an unknown amount of money acting as Greece around HMA and then pbbp's wheels here. One example is Leonard Dunn, that is the law or that is the guy who gets brought in to run HMA right around the time of the first blood scandal. He's a banker. A state police investigator wrote that Dunn had advised him quote he was host to Governor Clinton as well as a majority of

state politicians presently in office. Mister Dunn explained that he was very fond of politics. Doune added that he was the financial portion of the corporation as well as the political arm. Despite this, he also claimed he never took an active role in the company on a day to day basis.

these would be difficult negotiations. But the main result of these negotiations was that done in order to get the Corrections Board to agree, agreed to bring in an ombudsman to act as a compliance coordinator to ensure HMA followed the rules going forward. This ombudsman was Richard Mays, a Little Rock judge who had been appointed by Governor Clinton. His job at HMA was described by the state police as a bribe, because again, he's not really doing anything.

They're just like, yeah, just give another guy who like we owe a favor a job and pay him some money. He doesn't have to do much.

So but you know the fact that this guy who Clinton appoints as a judge becomes gets this bribe job. I don't think Clinton had nothing to do with that. The quote from Susie Parker's article hma President Done told investigators Dune stated that Walker advised him that Mays was black, a plus an assystem where most of the inmates are black, had good qualifications, and was an outstanding attorney. According to investigators notes.

Yeah what I mean, Man, the way this guy flies, he could really pick out a good kidney.

to keep his job. Quote the way Arkansas works is that once you are working within the system, the people in charge make it clear that it is a privilege to have that state contract. Ultimately you are expected to pay for that privilege. This, I know guster continues without the governor's support and protection, this disease riddled system would

have been shut down by nineteen eighty two. And again, Clinton doesn't make the system this way, but he is a guy who continues to work within a system in order to get the stuff done that he wants to get done right, And the fact that that system existed before and after him does not exempt him from responsibility for participating it.

a blood industry scandal. This is a lot of very important and if you're if you're picking out one of the threads involved in this scandal, then you're ignoring all of the other ones, and you're like it becomes clear, Okay, well you hate Governor Clinton, But like if if a governor you didn't hate had been doing all of the same things, wouldn't given a shit, you know, like, yeah.

was in office. That is incredibly boring today because political scandals have gotten so much worse, Like it's so quaint that like, oh man, remember when people were upset about these like shady business dealings. The president might be tied to good lord, we have.

at least simply more sympathetic to that. I think she does portray Clinton's involvement as like more direct and puppet

mastery than it was. I think this was something Clinton acceded to both because he gained some benefit from, like you know, giving some of these positions to people close to him, and because not messing with this allowed him to do like a politics was a trade for him, right Whereas like the other people running the Board of Corrections and running these these were the people who were

like directly setting up the system like this. Again, I think Clinton knew quite a bit of how bad this was and made some choices here, but he's not the puppet master right now. One of the issues here comes that alongside some strong connections which again don't imply that Clinton operated this program, but do in clay that he deserves quite a lot of blame.

on it. So I don't know. I don't know how much I believe that this is like a big deal. But the reason this is seen as a smoking gun right by some people, is that in July of nineteen ninety three, after Governor Clinton became President Clinton, Vince Foster shot himself to death in Washington, d C. Foster had discussed his depression with his sister over some time, and he was at that moment in a lot of trouble over a totally different controversy with the White House Travel Office.

And there's no evidence of anything here other than that Vince was a serial political operator who was involved in some shady shit and got disgraced, and who killed himself because he didn't want to live with the after effects, right. And you know that also the shit he was in, to the extent that it was shady, is very common

among people who are Arkansas politicos, right. But Vince's death has become a cornerstone of some of the more unhinged parts of the anti Clinton movement here allegations that like he was either murdered by the Clintons or that he killed himself because of the blood scandal, right, the Clinton's had him shot in order to cover this blood scandal up. And again it wasn't covered up. There's a documentary on it. People didn't care enough, but it wasn't you know, it

got out. And the reality is that the blood scandal didn't have an impact on Bill and Hillary's lives or political careers, not in a real massive way. And I can, in fact believe that people as connected as they are, you know, have contacts in the entertainment industry. But I also I just don't see the evidence that this destroyed them or that this wasn't that dangerous to them. In fact, in nineteen ninety two, Peter Longstaff, who tested positive for HIV.

Back in nineteen ninety five after receiving blood from US donors, tested positive for hepatitis C. And this was the same year that Clinton ran for presidential election. The Arkansas Times writs quote his former chief of staff, Betsy Wright, sent a memo titled prison Positives. That memo mentioned four points,

including education into prison by Bill Clinton. But the first point right listed was run cheapest system in the country, And so you kind of get even in ninety two, you know, the thing that, like the scandal here is not on their front burner. Their front burner still for him in ninety two, after it's very clear how bad a lot of this is was like the prison justin was cheap. Let's throw that in a bullet point list. You know, you know, it's a thing to run on.

interested in a safer blood treatment system. Right and likewise, if you're you know, and to the same extent that, like Bill's only interest in what happened in the prison system during his time was I need a bullet point of things that I can run on, right, and like, yeah, I put some educational programs in system. Was the cheapest you know that it's ever been. Bada bing bada boom.

I'm done thinking about the prisons and the state I run, you know, Like all of these are parts of the the why all of this kind of shit will keep happening.

plug something. I'm just throwing the ball over the court here, just doing like a halftime go for it, you know what I mean?