From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nol.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Michig, Control Decant. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Tonight's episode begins with a thank you. It'll turn into a thank you to many people, but our first thank you is to our fellow conspiracy realist Zach, who earlier hipped us to this story. We're talking about blood tonight, you guys, Bad Blood in particular.
If you want to hear that original message, go back to January eighteenth in the feed here wherever you're listening. It's a listener mail episode.
And as a disclaimer up top, this Bad Blood series will likely be a multi part, continuing thing. You are going to hear some problematic perspectives here, including depictions of drug abuse, graphic sexual violence, and discrimination. These, of course, do not represent our personal beliefs, yet they do form a mission critical component toward the understanding of Tonight's very real conspiracy. Here are the facts. The humans need blood.
I know it's a weird way to open it, but you know it's true.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's.
Really the only way to get it is through individuals we're willing to donate it, and that apparently, much like the blood itself, is in much shorter supply than we would like.
The reserves.
That is, you know, it is unpleasant to do so it is ainful. A lot of people have problems with needles, so there's any number of reasons. Also, there are a lot of things that exclude people from donating blood and maybe would like to.
Mm hmm, yeah, that's going to come up. We mentioned it in other episodes. We also mentioned it in like Strange News and Listener Mail.
Uh.
There are a lot of things that might be surprising to volunteer blood donors right and right now in the West, especially the vast majority of donations blood donations are going to come from volunteer donors. You're kind of you're like paid and some cheese nips and some juice, cookie.
Cook get a fun band.
So I guess you don't get paid for blood, but you do get paid pretty good for plasma, which we're also going to go into a big time right right.
Uh. For mostly human history, blood transfusion was not a thing. Blood letting it was definitely like getting it out of you was definitely a thing for purported medicinal purposes. Big thanks to conspiracy realist and fellow ridiculous historian Saturday Morning Cartoons, familiar to longtime listeners, for giving us a great scoop on modern versions of blood letting. Do you guys remember this?
Oh gosh, I don't think so.
Wrote to us about a condition called hemochromatosis, in which the body absorbs too much iron, and blood letting is still a viable treatment for that.
Condition, but you'd have to put plasma back in or something.
Right, Well, wasn't that a question that came up on our recent polio episode? I think I maybe asked are there any things that blood letting ever actually fixed or was a remedy for?
And that is a fantastic answer to that question. So thank you for that.
Yeah, like it SMC was saying, or like you were pointing out, Matt, it's almost a filtration system, right, They take the blood out, but then they put the plasma back in, and plasma is part of what you would call whole blood.
Well, yeah, and then theoretically you would you would grow create more red blood cells that wouldn't be infected with or wouldn't have too much iron attached to them.
Then you could.
Basically thin make by making new red blood cells via that plasma, which is kind of like I guess it's like the liquid through which your red blood cells flow and exist.
Right, like think in terms of like whole blood being platelets and then plasma.
But by and large, like the blood letting of you know, the olden times did more harm than good to rid people of a different kind of bad blood, a perceived bad blood that was the cause again, the perceived cause of whatever any number of maladies.
And up until pretty recently, in the grand scheme of things, if you were human and you lost a lot of blood one way or another, you were going to die. And that's because it wasn't until the mid sixteen hundreds, early to mid sixteen hundreds that people even understood the basics of how blood moves in the body.
Yeah, well, just in terms of things like regulating the pressure you know, to get it to flow from one system to the other.
I mean, basics like.
That had to be mastered before they could ever try this stuff on humans. So I believe then you found a source indicating that this was done with dogs, one of the first successful blood transfusions.
Yeah. Yeah, So in sixteen twenty eight, there's this physician in England named William Harvey. He's one of the first Western people to go, hey, I think this is kind of like you know roads. It goes in different directions on purpose. And then this leads to people trying to transfuse blood, but they don't understand blood types, they don't understand antibodies. It doesn't work very well until, like you were saying, Noel, in sixteen sixty five, there's another physician,
also English, Richard Lower, who successfully transfuses blood between dogs. Now, how did he make some of those dogs need blood?
Let's move off.
Well, not only that, can you imagine the horrific missteps that led to the first success in this particular venture. A lot of dogs on the cutting room floor, let's just say just so.
And the first successful human blood transfusion doesn't occur until a couple centuries later. In eighteen eighteen, and then it's not until almost a century after that that a guy named Karl Lonsteiner discovers the first human blood groups, leading to what we call blood types today. And then the first blood bank is established in Leningrad in nineteen thirty two Preceiege, by the way, and scientists the whole time are developing new types of blood transfusion. To your point, Matt,
about whole blood versus components of blood? Do you transfer the entirety of a person's blood? Do you drive the plasma and just transfer that? Do you do a platelet transfer?
Yeah, we should just break it down. It is plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Platelets are the things that hemophiliac might need because that helps you. It helps your body suture its own wounds.
Right.
Plasma is like the liquid portion. And if you see plasma just alone, it is weird. It's kind of like this yellowy, whitish.
Or it doesn't look like blood.
No, it's air.
Yeah, it looks like some other bodily looks like. Yeah.
The red blood cells are the things that carry oxygen and other really important stuff throughout your body, right, the stuff that makes your body go. And then the white blood cells are the things that travel through that blood and attack the bad stuff that comes into your system. So it is all of that thing, right Ben, And then it just you break those part things apart. Some people just need those platelets, and you can use plasma to kind of carry the platelets with that substance.
Interfuse, right, to separate the different components.
Yeah, spin in the blood.
There it is. Yeah, it's very very hot in that culture.
And just really quickly, in case anyone was wondering, is we're probably going to get into too much of this. What happens if someone gets a transfusion and I'm sure this happened again in the you know, leading up to doing the stuff right of the wrong blood type, it's really bad. It causes reactions that most closely related to
something called indo thelium. The red blood cells of the transfused blood get destroyed by the antibodies of the recipient, and it can literally cause the person to die instantly or go into shock and then die very quickly subsequent.
Because your body is saying, who are these foreign operatives?
Yeah?
You know what I mean. And also just for a completely unrelated thing that won't matter later. Do you guys feel comfortable sharing your blood types on air?
I am sad to say, embarrassed even that I don't know mine right off the rip, and I know that I should, especially given a apocalyptic type scenario.
Do you guys know, Yeah, yeah, I have. It's called M recursive. It's a very rare blood type.
Are you joking? Yes? Okay, because he had so there are you?
Know? It's funny though, because there is research ongoing into various rare blood types, and there is kind of a correlation between not quite genetics, not quite regional history, but there are some interesting correlations between blood type and ancestry. And there there are a lot of different breakthroughs in this science of saving people through blood transfusions. We want to give a big shout out to Charles Richard Drew.
He is the.
Guy who figured out plasma specifically and how to preserve it in what we call modern day blood banks. And then in nineteen sixty four US scientist named Judith Poole discovered something called cryo precipitate, and that's like plasma plus whole blood extract that you can use you can deliver to people with hemophilia, and it helps their blood coagulate. So hemophilia, the problem with it is your blood doesn't,
like you said, it doesn't quite suiture. So like the kind of scrape you might get on your knee, or the kind of you know, like if you cut the palm in your hand or anywhere near a vein or an artery and you don't have hemophilia, then you can press on the wound and the blood will coagulate. But if you do have hemophilia, like certain members of certain
royal families, then the fire hydrants just open and often. Historically, hemophilia was noticed in most in European royalty because they had the they had the best medical care of their day. This is not to say in any way that hemophilia only occurs in that population, but it is relatively rare, right, yes, yeah, it is relatively. I mean it's tricky too, because we
don't want to sound dismissively. If it's relatively rare in a population of billions of people and it still impacts you or remember one of your loved ones, then it's still horrific. And there's one problem with cryo precipitate. This is kind of pure science, and it doesn't really have a patent, and it's therefore more treatment that is not super profitable. So pharmaceutical companies come up with a solution, something they can patent and monetize. It's called factor concentrate.
Yeah, and really quickly, I just wanted to add we were talking a bit about blood types and rarity.
The rarest of blood types.
Is AB negative, with only one percent the population exhibiting that, and then another pretty rare blood type is OH negative, which is seven percent, but that is considered the universal donor. So it is actually the type of blood that is most desirable because it can be used in a pinch in an emergency situation.
And according to Pfizer guys, there around two hundred thousand people who live with some form of hemophilia in the US alone.
Right, and considering that the US is only three hundred thirty million or so, you can see the scale of the problem, especially in places that don't have medical infrastructure, and there are quite a few across the globe. So this factor concentrate idea, they think of it in terms of a product. It solves a couple of issues. One
in a very soulless way. It solves a profit question, but also it becomes very easy to deploy because regular cryo precipitate and blood transfusions traditionally they come from a single donor. This factor concentrate is a lot more like mixed fruit juice. You know, they've got a percentage of other stuff, the.
Percentage with concentrate right right.
With concentrate, that's a factory.
And it's important to note that it's not prefix. But the first part of that word, right, cryo. When when I hear that, I think cryogenics or are we talking about freezing? Yes, we are talking about freezing, which actually comes into play in a couple of well at least one of the major stories we're going to cover today.
And really quickly, guys, does blood type play into the ability to use blood plasma to.
Create this product? I think no, because it's meant to be.
Is there a cryo precipitate for a specific way. It's like one size fits all, right.
I think because you're spinning it down to the plasma that you're and platelets. That's you're taking out the red the RBC's right, and the white blood cell. So I think that's the difference here.
So it's type agnostic. I think, is this just important to differentiate?
Yeah, this factor concentrate. Because of this fruit juice analogy, it could use numerous sources, not just one donor. It could use material from up to forty to sixty thousand donors to make a single batch. Now, assuming all these donors are vetted, this can be a life saving treatment and a huge income stream. It's a global trade. The blood game is global, just like the organ trade or the red market. Check out our episodes on that. You know, it's a common need. You need to eat, you need
to sleep, you need to stay hydrated. Every human being also needs a certain amount of blood in their body to continue functioning. So if you get a grievous injury, if you have a persistent medical condition, a trauma like an operation or childbirth, then your body will find itself in sudden and dire need of fresh blood. So the creation of blood banks, if you think about it, it
allows civilization to prepare for disasters in advance. You know, think about a huge war right now, like the Red Cross, as we'll discuss later, in the omicron wave of the pandemic, they declared a blood crisis because people weren't going outside to donate blood with the Red Cross.
Guys. I didn't know you could lose almost half a gallon or around half a gallon of blood before you die.
Yeah, it's not pretty though.
Yeah, I mean it all depends on your size, right, but still like half a gallon of blood?
Oh, you guys are recount that very briefly.
I witnessed a serious motorcycle accident outside my house yesterday and was able to call the paramedics and help the gentleman with some towels and such and give them some water, and some folks in the neighborhood came. But this man cracked his head significantly on the concrete, was not wearing a helmet, and it was a lot more blood than I've ever seen before. And he did go to the hospital after being treated on site with just some bandages. And I'm happy to report that we saw him around
the neighborhood yesterday. So I was shocked at how much blood he lost, and I'm sure he got a little transduc when he went to Grady.
Happy to hear that. Happy to hear these in better health, right, head wounds do bleed quite a bit, surprisingly, so similar to the issues of Oregon trade and donation. There's always a chance probability that something could go wrong, and it's because the demand is all. It can go up and down, but there's always a base level of demand. We got some statistics from the American Red Cross that tell us every two seconds a person in the United States alone
needs blood and or platelets. So you've got to have it banked in advance, right, you can't just you can't farm to table blood, not legally.
Like as in like go out and get donations fresh.
Like a blood bag and fury road.
Yeah.
Right, Well, unless they're your friend and they're doing it willingly and they're doing it probably at your house, that's not gonna happen, and you've made them I would make them sign a way or two before you did anything like that, even if it's kinky in nature, which is creepy. I found out that's a thing. Don't look into that, Okay.
But do check out our Modern Vampires episode, yeah, which talks about very similar things. The science is there. It's disturbing.
Yeah, And as we said, you know, different people need different forms of the blood for different things. We're talking everything from surgeries to like again, a hemophilia treatment like we're going to be talking about. I believe it can be used with cancer treatments as well, anything where a patient in a going through some kind of medical procedure may need blood for one of many many reasons.
Yeah, and right now, if you look at just a snapshot again in the US alone, you'll see that on a daily basis, we're looking at what they call twenty nine thousand units of red blood cells, five thousand units of platelets, and sixty five hundred units of plasma every twenty four hours right now as we're recording. The blood and the platelets cannot be made synthetically, so you have to have human donors. And every year some people in the US do donate blood, about three percent of Americans.
Yes, and there is, by the way, a massive push within the R and D sectors of pharmaceutical giants to create that thing. Ben is describing their kind of synthetic form of the constituent parts of blood, which is creepy to think about, but could be amazing. It could be a revolution in science and medicine.
And now we have to ask what happens when this red liquid red market goes wrong? What we see here, the need for a constant supply, the ever present chance for a sudden spike in demand. It all adds up to one statistical certitude. There is opportunity for profit, and that means there is opportunity for corruption. With this mind, did you come as no surprise that things went terribly wrong way more than once? I suggest we take a pause for a word from our sponsor, check our blood bags,
and come back for more. Here's where it gets crazy. Honestly. The first crazy thing is this is going to be a multi part series because there were a lot of blood supply scandals and conspiracies out there, and uh, you know, before we get too much in the deep water, guys, do you remember we did that show in New York and uh the there was all this branded stuff they don't want you to know, uh swag, and they had that drink.
The blood bags. Yeah, that was a nice touch. I think Halloween.
It was some kind of like blood orange cocktail, but it literally came in these ivy bags. And I got to wonder what specialty event caterer came up with that.
Okay, okay, I was I was thinking of the one in Hell's Kitchen and I was like, I don't remember that being a part of that movie.
The Hell's Kitchen was cool too, and they made some neat swag, but this was specifically a Halloween event and they like had them hang.
I think they were distributing them on those live poles. Yeah, it was.
I was confused by that one. I was like, I'll hold one for the photo, but could I have.
Several because I have a pbr.
PPR is an award winning beer by the way. Yeah, So look, the other conspiracies we're talking about are things like, like we mentioned at the top, controversies surrounding donor candidacy, like discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, uh, traveling to the United Kingdom because of bovine sponge offm encephalopathy, Matt cow Right tattoos, right, Yeah, I.
Was kind of giving my partner heads up on this episode. And she wants so badly to donate blood and isn't scared of needles, hence all of her tattoos which exclude her from donating blood.
We're also talking about one of the oldest conspiracies mam and fans love it, the danger of prophet. You know, we talked about the old trope of someone donating plasma for a little extra cash or donating blood for cash. What happened would not sort of trade meets a literal captive audience. This is the story Bad Blood, Part one, the Arkansas prison blood scandal.
Right And one thing we do want to mention it was it was interesting when our listener Zach wrote in about this topic. I think all three of us were sort of like this rings a bell to some degree, but not in like this was reported a ton by the mainstream media way. But I do remember a colleague of ours who I worked with on a couple of true crime podcasts, Laura and Pacheco, had at one point introduced us to this fella named Kelly Duda who made
a documentary. It did a very deep dive investigative documentary about this very topic. It's a documentary that's a bit hard to find. We were able to get a copy of it and watched it and really really great reporting ben off Bank. We all talked about how there were some issues with the way sexual orientation is discussed, not from by the filmmaker, just by the subjects.
This is Arkansas in the nineties.
This this scandal took place in the eighties and so there's some problematic associations for sure.
And it was released officially in two thousand and five, and Kelly had been working at least according to him in the documentary, had been working on it for five years.
Such it really does, I mean, like it's a lot going on. The story evolves.
Yeah, but it's crazy to think just how the way human beings talk about subjects publicly can change. Just think about where we are right now and then just go back twenty twenty five years and it's completely different. So that is definitely a full on warning there.
Yeah, yeah, heads up on that. One thing we can say is, unfortunately a through line is the dehumanization of disadvantaged populations. That's what you're really I mean, that's the umbrella term for what you're seeing in this film as well as subsequent interviews. In court testimony, our documentarian and
journalists Duda alleges the following. He says, the prison system of the state of Arkansas made massive profits selling blood plasma from inmates for the span of thirty years three decades, and these inmates were paid a very small fee, not even real cash actually, each time they donated or as they put it as they refer to it, each time they bled, and these donations were then sold at a massive markup to these blood brokers, which is a real job,
and those are human beings, not vampires, and they sell this. They sell these products through a series of proxy and shell companies all around the world. And it's a genuine blood harvesting scheme that would make any self respecting nos veratu go woo hoo at first, and then oh a little bit late because you're like, oh, cool, blood around the world on demand tight, and then you say, wait, what kind of blood? And that's where the problem begins.
It does.
And one of the problems begins as well with the fact that the blood bank, I guess we'll call it the program at this penitentiary is staffed largely by inmates as well, who are servicing other inmates who they may or may not have relationships with in terms of their ability to do them as solid if they want to get that privilege that comes along with donating the blood, even if they're technically should be excluded, Yeah, I want to donate blood.
There's so much to break down, it really is.
And I'm sorry, what didn't mean to spoil anything with that. I just I think that's a big part of the structure of the whole program feels really rife for this kind of thing that isn't even part of the corruption. This is just like a problematic framework for how the whole thing is run.
Yeah, guys, should we just lay out just the very basic basics of the incentive or the motive here, because Ben, you mentioned that like the inmates could get a small amount of money or not real money, you know, almost like a credit to do that.
So, like most prison systems in the United States, the prison system of Arkansas has some systemic, abiding and deeply disturbing issues within the way it handles incarceration. We have to just briefly, it may not sound related, but it is important. Just briefly, we have to talk about prison farms because a lot of times when people think of prison you might think of like a concrete bunkers brutalist architecture thing where people spend all their time in cells.
But in a prison farm, you are sending inmates out to do manual logging, agriculture, even mining.
Outsourcing industry is outsourcing this stuff. And we've talked a lot about how this in many ways replaced the institution of slavery.
Yeah, it sounds like slave labor, but it's not, according to the thirteenth monment.
On paper, Thank you, Ben that was trying to come up. That's right, the thirteenth Amendment. There's an incredible documentary about that if you want to dig deeper up. But I think it's just called the thirteenth or thirteenth.
But that is absolutely what's happening here.
And we see it all over the place, but especially in Deep South kind of places that historically had that slave labor.
It's like, oh, well, we've got this reversion of it. Now, don't tell you about it. It's fine.
Arkansas is the only state that had a completely self sustaining prison system that cost the state zero dollars because they produced enough goods.
Politicians love that, which is that's crazy.
That's another way of saying they made money for the like say it it didn't cost the state. Is also a way of saying it was a profit center for the state.
Oh yeah, they paid their fair share to stay in prison and all the work, right, and.
These agricultural goods and these prison farms. The one we're talking about in particular, the Cummings Unit formerly Common State Farm. Uh. The produce, the agricultural things they made were in theory used to feed the prisoners themselves and then as a second tier other quote unquote wards of the state. So like the food went to orphanages, to folks in asylums before you know, the asylum system of the US got changed into its present state. But oh shucks, we got all that surplus.
What are we gonna do with that?
I guess, you know, school lunches, I don't know, sell that right, right, they probably did. And if you look on the app what you'll see is the Cummings Unit again formerly the Common State Farm. It's in Lincoln County, Arkansas. It's about sixty miles southeast of Little Rock, which is the state capitol, and it's a place with a horrifying history. Shout out to our earlier episodes on human experimentation.
But if you look at it comes up here in the story. Oh yeah, oh.
Exactly, so yeah. I mean it was kind of a lord of the fly situation for a long time, you know, kind of like what was it Angola in Louisiana.
One of the ways the prison got away with such a low operating budget is because they just had the prisoners police themselves and they didn't hire correctional officers outside of the warden in a few other specialty positions.
That is common.
That is, like you hear about that a lot with these types of prison farm situations, and it often leads to.
Communication breakdown.
It often leads to like like you said, Ben, lord of the Flies type scenarios.
You know, and I guess, I mean, maybe that's an innovative thing that I just don't understand, but it does feel like the perfect way kind of what you're saying to breed potential corruption at least.
Maybe it's like when they say the prisoners are running the asylum. You know, I mean again antiquated terminology, but it is a term people throw around. It usually isn't describing something orderly and neat.
Yeah, it's like you were saying, Matt, these some trustee prisoners replaced the role of overseers on an development plantation.
Right.
They're rolling around, they have firearms, they're quote unquote enforcing rules, but they become sort of like gang bosses, you know, running the corner boys. Abuse is rampant, any kind of abuse you can imagine, folks, drugs are very common, and the idea of drug safety or harm reduction is very not common. We're talking and dirty needles, We're talking very nasty stuff. Vectors for blood borne disease, dirty needles for
the intravenous drug use. And as we're going to discuss more of, potentially, in the operations of the blood bank, the authorities, the few actual authorities there, they had to know these prisoners were victimizing each other, often brutally. Simply put, it was a place that Arkansas put human beings to rot. And you can read a number of intensely disturbing and
true accounts of atrocity and assault over the years. It's just so many, in fact, that regardless of your stance on the prison system, you have to admit that the folks in charge of this farm throughout the decades, it's hard to believe they were either not aware of this
or somehow not complicit. And to the point about human experimentation, right around just before the blood bank program is beginning, sort of concurrently with it, there's a guy named doctor Austin R. Stowe who comes to the who comes to Cummins Farm with the intention to use this facility as a test site for biological experimentation.
Yeah, and it like the blood bank, we have to believe this, I think begins as a potentially greater good argument.
Right.
I would like to test biological things that could help a lot of people on human subjects, and I, as this doctor, am going to choose prisoners as my test subjects, just the way the blood donation people who are in charge of the operation. When you can watch them being interviewed in this documentary that we watched, and they you look at their face and they're trying so hard at least is my opinion, to make themselves see the greater good like thing that they got sold or they sold
themselves on at the beginning. Does that make sense?
Yeah, Folks like John Bias, the medical administrator.
Yes, And in this case you don't get to talk to doctor Austin Stowe, but this guy comes in thinking, you have to believe in some small part, I'm going to do the world a favor by literally experimenting on these inmates, by giving them things like typhoid and whooping cough and trying to develop cures or some kind of treatment for those things.
But it also sort of belies the fact that the mentality around inmates and incarceration, you know, is a dehumanizing one, and at least in this part of the country, in this you know example, probably on a much larger scale, these are subhuman animals that are not worthy of the rights that we all enjoy, and they therefore should either be put to work for pennies or literally injected with mystery stuff.
Oh yeah, one hundred percent right. These are test subjects in the eyes of this doctor and other people who did this.
Right, Maybe he's seeing his name in a medical textbook several generations hence, and it says. It doesn't say here's the guy who experimented on prisoners. It said, here's the guy who cured whooping cough. Here's the guy who cured typhoid. So the greater good argument is real. And of course they were also injecting these guys with every version of
hepatitis they could imagine. And the idea was, look, if we sacrifice these members of the population that we don't really consider human, then we can save the folks we consider respectful or useful. And this what they did was it was worse than Tuskegee in Tuskegee. The authorities ignored
syphilis and injective placebos or treated with placebos. In this one, they knowingly purposely put these live contagions into these people and rolled the dice of the immune system, and the idea was if they survived it, they would generate antibodies and antigens that could be used to create cures, right the same way a de weaponized polio virus creates the polio vaccine.
Dude, there was a doctor in the doctor in the documentary who ended up going through some of the facilities they were used by this person, this doctor Stowe Stough, and he tells a story about the dental chair. Do you guys remember this. Yes, they moved a dental chair that was in one of the old rooms where this guy operated, and when they moved it, there were one hundred and fifty four death certificates that kind of fell
out from whoops underneath it. And maybe I'm wrong here, but I feel like the implication I didn't understand if that was one hundred and fifty four human beings that had died in the prison, or if it was one hundred and fifty four human beings that were being tested upon that had a death certificate pre written basically to say, oh, we expect these guys to die.
We don't expect the last.
I think it's unfortunately. I think it's a mix. In terms of potential, we don't know, because as we'll see, also, there's a strong implication the paperwork was cooked.
It was it was.
Actually got way. I'd be too kind. There's an implication that a lot of paperwork was cooked. There is proof that some of it was. This prison donation program, it's called the bleed program. And when you hear these guys talk about what's happening, they're not saying you could choose to donate blood. They're saying you could bleed. And a lot of people decided to bleed so that they could
get their script that we mentioned earlier. This thing, this bleed prom is a direct result, a direct offshoot of this human experimentation. It starts officially in nineteen sixty four, and then just three years later. The actual blood bank comes into play in nineteen sixty seven and continually has problems with its refrigerators.
Right, look, just really quickly again, just shout out to Kelly dude, because this is original reporting, original investigation. This guy was very tenacious and asking questions of a lot of different people. And the part in the film that took me about in terms of what you're talking about is someone who worked in the program describing the smell of I guess deteriorating plasma. It has a certain smell as it kind of rots almost.
Yeah, we talked about how the cryo was in that word, right, that's right to make this thing. So it needs to be taken fresh from a human body then frozen immediately in order for the process to function and to be able to be transferred to another patient down the line. But if the freezer breaks as is that I think it's what you're talking about, Noel.
Yea.
That blood it's like blood that's just laying around anywhere, right, and it gets a smell to.
It and it's not like it's not like leaving pizza out.
It is efficaciousness or yeah, it can be dangerous. But have we talked about how this result. There's the blood bank part, which is just run of the mill blood donation, and then there's a contract that led to the blood being used for that factor eight stuff. Right, we connected those dots that just want to make sure.
Yeah, so after this thing starts in sixty seven, this blood bank storing up the blood from the program that begins in sixty four. The stuff they get from these prisoners is sold to the private industry with the you know, with the cosine and the green light of the appropriate authorities. Exactly right, the FDA, for example, and the connected politicians are telling each other, you know, this is a way for our prisoners and our prison system to make money.
This will help the prisoners with the commissary, this will help the prison system not be a drain on the taxpayers. And if I get a kickback. You know when when Arkansas law, by the way, at that time, and I believe still today for bids paying prisoners for their labor, it definitely forbade it at that time, shout out the thirteenth Amendment.
So what's the handful of bucks? Like it would be in what like lunch tokens? Like it's just not real money, and it represents something that you can use only within the system.
It's like that song sixteen tons. Yeah, a company store or or dave Imbusters. You know, your dB power card doesn't work at your local taco.
Bell, And it's unclear what one unit is actually worth in dollars, you know, American are pounds sterling.
The inmates themselves would not have known, the would likely not have known what that markup was. It was this system. It is set up by that guy, doctor Stowe, and it runs from sixty seven to seventy eight. It is managed at various times from a couple of different groups of academics. However, it is always in cooperation with the Arkansas Department of Corrections. And this is where again our journalists we can't say enough good stuff about Kelly Duda
speaking truth to power. He says, Look, these administrators knew something was going on, and they were just chasing and paraphrasing, they were just chasing the profits here and being willfully ignorant of the dangers. Is very poor supervision already historically in this institution, and the supervision doesn't improve. There's disease tainted blood and it's being drawn from folks were known to have hepatitis or who have already tested positive for HIV or you know, well, I do have to say it.
HIV at the time was not very widely understood, right, so they but they knew about the hepatitis, and even if this blood was left out, even if the refrigeration broke, even if the people who were donating the blood were known to use intravenous drugs and share needles, it was still being shipped off to these blood brokers.
And that was something that I think I was trying to get out earlier, at least we all were been talking about how it was the inmates also running the show, who maybe had relationships with the inmates who were coming in, wanted to donate blood, but should have been excluded from said you know donation because of any number of factors, like you mentioned, being intervenience drugs, having some of these excluding you know conditions, But their pals on the inside
could doctor the docs for them and allow them to get that script. So it's literally an incentive to lie and the means with which to do it very effectively. And then obviously the higher ups aren't double checking behind any of this, and they're just shipping the stuff out anyway.
But a lot of this is alleged.
We don't want to, yeah, break let's break down the money according to inmates who actually went through the system. Okay, so when you walk in as an inmate to bleed, you were going to receive at least, according to the documentary, seven dollars in this you know cash that you get to use a commissary, right, seven dollars of blood that
you were giving. Now, there was something called the blood tax or the blood fee that those administering the procedure would ask for if you were just coming in to, you know, get an extra bleed in to make an extra seven dollars, they would the person administrating what is that term, the person who actually drove blood flebottomus, the flebottomists.
Those weren't inmates, right, Those were doctors or professionals with some medical training.
Am I right?
Or I think it was both. There's at least a few flebotomous who were inmates that were interviewed in their documentary. But they would charge that person donating blood two dollars of that seven dollars. So they would make just a tiny bit on the top in order to perform the procedure and would make necessary changes to the documentation if they needed to do that, and often they didn't need
to do that, make any changes. Then that blood goes out and generally the Department of Corrections and this association through the blood program would make between fifty and seventy dollars for that one donation, So they're making money hand over foot in this in this scenario.
And then let's consider additionally, Additionally, prison politics come into play. So there are ganglord, there are abusive members of the prison population who are forcing their victims to go in and donate blood or to bleed, and those folks are not seed. Even the script that they're ostensibly receiving, it's going straight to this capo. And this is an ugly situation all round. We know that we know that there
was not adequate screening for disease. We know that the state investigators themselves, largely due to Doudah's investigation, would later confirm allegations that prisoners were not paid in cash all the time, but sometimes they were compensated with further access to drugs, which is just making a bad thing worse.
Well, just the fact that it's on the honor system. According to several people who are interviewed, it is a small piece of paper when you walk in to donate for the first time, and or actually I think it's
any time. It literally says do you take intravenious drugs and then a couple other questions and you just say no, and then you can give blood and nobody tests your blood, nobody does any kind of checks, and there's nobody from the administrative side coming down, say for like once every couple of months or even you know, we're talking years sometimes where they're coming down to check on the system because they can run it from Afar, like from Little Rock,
and run the political side of it, and then they just they let it run, right.
Yeah, And why wouldn't they, you know, because the money's coming in.
And to put it in perspective, this piece of paper you have to sign a technically it's legally bind date. It's treated with the same amount of authority as a warning on a website that says are you over eighteen? Most people just click yes, you know what I mean. There's there's no real crisis of faith for folks at this time.
Yeah.
You know how many times of accidentally clicked on No. When I've gone to a website, I just like super fast click and then I just can't access the website for maker's mark for some reason.
I've clipped a few just to see what happened. I should say click, but I also screen grabbed it because I am a very well adjusted person. Speaking of adjustments, guys, we just got a message from Paul Mission Controlled decand he says everything is shut down unless we go to a second ad break.
Okaw, that seems fair.
But we haven't even gotten to Little Rock yet.
We're on the way and we have returned, so let's do that. Let's without delay get to Little Rock. On our way to Little Rock, we're going to have to walk through some of the bloody sausage making here. The private piece of the conspiracy that we mentioned, the private entity that contacts these blood brokers. It's not Arkansas Presents directly. It's a company called Health Management Associates Incorporated. What do we say about innocuous names.
There's weird stuff going on.
Well, yeah, just ask Leonard Dunn what There are a bunch of people who are involved in HMA. They interviewed Norman Dixon, who was an employee. Who's the other person. There's a Congressman, Vick Snyder that talks about it. Who was Wasn't he a doctor for HMA for a while?
He certainly was interviewed in an earlier phase of his career. In the documentary, okay, and he's being a massive apologist for the whole thing and even talking about the investigation after the fact and saying more or less he got nothing on me coppers, you know. And then due to finds him later and he sort of is playing nice, being like, oh.
What was that thing again that we talked about back?
You know what I mean.
I don't know how he came off to you guys, but well there's.
Also he still has nothing on my main guy again. I just want to mention him. In the documentary, John Bias famously said, you know what if I I'll tell you what. If I need a product, then I'll take this product we made. Oh anything else out there?
Should we read that entire day? Oh my god, gosh, there we have the whole thing. Here he goes. He says, quote, you can take me and lay me on that table and hook me up. And after you tell me that that product came through our system, talking about the prison system, blood donation donation program, you can infuse that into me. I'm that sure. But you take me out to the center,
some center somewhere, and I'm not so sure anymore. I've got more information on John Doe donor in my system than they do, basically saying I know everything about my prisoners, but I don't know the anonymous so and so at you know, actual blood donation made through the Red Cross.
And he went to BAT because he wants to He wants to convey or message that he finds nothing wrong with how this was being handled and that any problems were not a result of the actions of the organization that he oversaw. So the question is, then, was it something else in the long chain of proxies from donor to end user. That's where Health Management Associates comes into play.
Like we said, it was founded to run the prison medical program as well as the plasma harvesting program, and HMA sold each unit of plasma for around fifty dollars US. We mentioned we should say this part we almost talked about earlier. The prisoners are not getting fifty bucks a pop. They're getting that script the company store money. And even with the looking into it, we did different people don't have they don't have a uniform amount that was paid.
It was kind of black box, which makes me think they probably lowered the compensation for more desperate donors and there was probably variants across time.
Yeah, it does make sense if they were selling it for seventy that they would give somebody like ten percent or less. Right, that makes sense to me when you're doing the math.
So, speaking of our returning characters, the FDA in nineteen eighty two, at the end of the year, they issue a warning about buying plasma from prisons and they say specifically as the world comes to grip with HIV, they say specifically that prisoners are more likely than the general non prison population to be infected with things like HIV and hepatitis.
But despite that, Hma contracted with Condinal Pharma Cryosam Limited, which is Canada's largest blood broker, and then Cryosan went turned around and sold the plasma to companies across Europe and in Japan and to an outfit called Connaught Laboratories, which company based in Toronto, and sold those very products that we mentioned at the top of the show needed
by hemophiliacs throughout Canada, things called cryo precipitates. And then I believe the brand name of it, or at least a branded version of it, was that Factor eight, right.
Yeah, Yeah, And we have to remember the vast majority just get this out. The vast majority of people, virtually all of them, who are receiving this tainted product, they have no idea of its providance. And also, you can make a very solid argument that the origin of the blood product is purposely obscured from the end receiver.
Yeah.
Well, and theoretically there are so many checks that it could have, could have and should have gone through that blood each donation, right, every time it gets sold, at least batches should have been checked in some way, at a sufficient in a sufficient way that you could guarantee this product is going to be safe for the end user.
Well, guys, really quickly, I just wanted to ask a lot of this. You know, in the documentary is handled as allegations simply because no one will cop.
To any of this.
And it seems that there is an unequivocal evidence of where these bad units came from.
Well, well, it's easy to pass the buck again, Spider Man teach other.
Yeah.
Yeah, So there's another quiet part that must be said. Allowed alluded to this earlier, how much did the state government of Arkansas know at the time at least part of this unfolded under the governorship of a guy named Willie Clinton later would go on to be US President Bill Clinton. He always called himself Bill. I don't think he called him Willy. Yeah, slicks a T shirt version of him. Slick Willy is a weird nick name. But I know that that stood out to Doudah in his research.
That stood out to I think all of us, what are you guys takes on it.
I think some people get a little caught up in it. But it does seem like there is plenty of room for political corruption, for dollars to flow towards Little Rock throughout this whole scheme, right.
Not to mention it's probably politically savvy and advantageous for your record to maintain a prison system that doesn't cost the taxpayers any money.
Well, people like that in general.
People do well, Yeah, and nobody really likes it when I don't know, the governor appoints a bunch of really close friends to the board of the Department of Corrections, which is it's illustrated in the documentary that that's the reality. It's illustrated that other people who were involved in the Department of Corrections, which just because of his title, Bill Clinton ran as governor like he was head of the Department of Corrections.
Being commander in chief. You know, I mean it's but just want to say.
Too, the appointing your buddies to these positions is super common and not in and of itself evidence that he knew what was going on specifically. But let's also remember that Bill Clinton was incredibly popular and he was seen as a very successful governor, to the point that he just blew the pants right off of the America at large as a candidate for president. Not to mention it so many ex sax playing yeah and pants actual pants
being wow blowing. Sorry, jeez, Louise, Okay, I forgot about that'll scandal.
But just think about how many scandals we've actually discussed in the past.
You know, Watergate, not Watergate, sorry, the real estate stiff. Sure, there's also you know, clearly, political cronyism is a key ingredient for an governorship recipe, right, That's just how it works in the West, and i a pos it in many other countries. In the back rooms of political deal making and shadowy handshakes, evil can spread ignored, just like
an infection in the blood. It can pass hand to hand just like a dirty needle, and you don't have to be aware of exactly what's happening to decide to be willfully blind right to an inconvenient truth. I'm doing an outgore reference whatever. So it's thanks his nineteen eighty four, the FDA says, yoinks, HMA, you can no longer have a license for all this dirty plasma you're making because
it has hepatitie. But somehow, through some sort of political machination, HMA managed to get its license back just a few months later, it was able to retain its contract. Indeed, after a state police investigation, partially because Leonard Dunn, whom we mentioned earlier, HMA's president, he had juice, he had suction, as they say in the wire, and he was a
Pine Bluff banker at the time. He would later go on, it's just to connect which dots you want, But he would later go on to work on Bill Clinton's nineteen ninety gubernatorial campaign. Dude, they knew each other. Did they just not talk about this part?
Oh?
Come on, come on. So for me, it goes back to people like John Bias and I cannot remember the other person's name. There's another person who was running HMA that was really important. It's interviewed. But I know John Bias was on the Correctional Department of correction side, medical facility side. But those people literally would come and visit
every once in a while. And just imagine that when they come in to the facility to check out how everything's being run, they're getting everybody at the facility is getting a heads up, Hey, boss, the boss is coming. We need to clean up our act for the day or for whatever. Because mister Bias is in town. When he comes in, he may legitimately think that everything is going great, everything is as it should be.
Right.
I've been in that situation on the other side as a worker, where you try and make everything perfect because the boss is coming around at.
Least enough to sleep at night. He could tell himself that.
That's I think that's exactly what it is, because it's that up the.
Chain because every time I saw it, he says, every time I saw it, everything was spick and span, you know. Which is like a regional manager or a corporate level manager going to the McDonald's and say, well, I don't know what this thing is about the ice cream machine. They always work when I come out the South.
But but I think what Matt's getting at and I completely agree, is that he's already given a little bit.
Of leniency even on top of you know, but you know.
It's he'sgether getting the heads up. They're making it nice as nice as it can be given the circumstances. And then he's already given them a little bit of a pass. But it's enough, to your point, to help him sleep at night. And this is what the officials point to time and time again.
No.
Look, see, the FDA folks came through said it was fine. It was I mean, come on, that's the ultimate passage of the buck.
Because the FDA found contamination inside their samples. But then John Biason, the other head, said no, no, we don't have any contamination. We'll go and check. So they went and looked at the paperwork that was generated by largely inmates who were running their own system and making money through that system. So nobody has an incentive to tell the truth at any point, and the.
FDA is not interviewing the inmates.
By the way, No, I'm sorry, just to clarify, the FDA did do numerous inspections where they didn't find any tainted stuff.
Right like this was at one point, they did.
But like the point, the thing that the officials point to is the FDA had numerous successful inspections.
Yes, but then they find one and I think it's eighty three when they find the tainted blood, and then it takes intol eighty four to shut it down. Then like six months later, it's back back again, as Ben is describing.
And so the world goes nuts. Let's talk about consequences because, again, thanks in large part to Dudah's relentless journalism, the truth outs, and especially in the United Kingdom and then later in Italy which we'll get to, people found that blood brokers had sold this tainted Factor eight two folks who often had hemophilia right, and they needed they needed something to help their blood coagulate to treat their condition, people bleeding disorders,
or folks who had an operation and needed blood transfusion, or or gave birth and needed a blood transfusion. All of a sudden they found themselves potentially infected with hepatitis and HIV. And how did this happen? In Ocean Away It's because the UK was struggling to keep up with the demand for this blood clotting treatment. Factor eight and so they started as a result, they started importing supplies from the US or Canada through a series of blood brokers.
Blood brokers still very much a thing.
It's a real job.
It's crazy. It's like currency trading. And at the time again HIV, humans still didn't totally understand it. And to be completely honest, humans at this point are still trying to figure out how hepatitis actually works, how many different kinds of hepatitis are around. And by the mid nineteen eighties, you know mentioned ninety eight three earlier, By the mid nineteen eighties, it was clear HIV was bloodborn, and so people started heat treating these factory products to kill viruses.
And it wasn't until nineteen ninety one that the screening of all these products became normalized. So up to nineteen ninety one, there were separate sets of siloed evaluation processes, right, and those credits might not transfer.
Yeah, And then you know, very shortly after they finally everybody got their act together, everyone decided on a way to fix this. Then the synthetic stuff comes into play, which is crazy expensive at the time when it first is introduced, but still, like we were talking about with platelets and other you know, parts of blood. There is
a new serum, right. This isn't like blood in the same way a synthetic blood would be, but it is a serum that performs in the way that this plasma platelet combo would do.
It's like that stuff on True Blood that allowed the vampires not to have to feed on humans.
I'm sorry, that's a dumb reference. It was a dumb show. But they did have a.
Season one was good.
Season one was I forget.
What it was called, but it was basically like a beverage of some kind that allowed them not to have to, you know, drink real blood.
I think it was called True Blood.
I think it was called tue Blood. I'm sorry, that's exactly right that.
I just remember those vampires were real into each other.
They really liked j scenery and each other and campier, you know, yeah, fun obscure fact. True Blood started out as like a horror series.
Novel. I'm sorry.
I did read the novels too.
They're pretty horny too.
I believe they were pretty horny. Yeah, they were a regular Balder's Gate three. But so we got to talk about one thing called the Creaver Commissioner Crever Commission.
K R e V e R.
The Canadian government puts US into place in nineteen ninety three to investigate the blood scandal, and what they found was quote, the shipping papers accompanying the plasma had not yet revealed that the center was located in a prison. This is why I think it's a conspiracy. They had simply referred to the sources as the quote ADC Plasma Center, Grady, Arkansas with end quote, with no indication of what ADC stood for Arkansas Department of Corrections.
Wow.
That feels very on purpose.
Wow.
Yeah, that's that is horrifying. That is horrifying.
It just it makes it a little more difficult to It makes that, oh, we didn't know, you know, we're as confused as you guys. It makes that a little bit more of a tall milkshake. Twenty nineteen, the UK launches an inquiry, and this inquiry again only comes about as a result of Dudah's work and years of campaigning on behalf of the victims who claimed that the risk were never explained to them, which means they didn't have informed consent and that the scandal was being covered up
by private industry. There are multiple examples. You can find great reporting on this, and you know, honestly, our hearts go out to these people. They were trying to do the right thing and they were trying to save their lives or life of a loved one, and they got touched by this conspiracy and corruption as a result.
Yeah, there are horrible stories that exist in that documentary, that exist in reporting on this since it goes way back, but since the nineties, it's been reported on pretty heavily, and it got quite a bit of a tension right around the time and just before this documentary was released in two thousand and five. But then it really does. As Kelly Duden points out in the documentary, it seems to have kind of fallen off a cliff for what a decade?
Yeah, and then the first things he says too, he's like, what happened to this?
And then it comes back right, and that's when some of the bigger investigations come in, because that's when you know, everyone figures out, oh, this is a giant court proceeding that we have to go through now that we have to fight for justice for a long time.
Right, the burden again is on the consumer, which is a dangerous part of the American narrative right now it went global. I mean there's another consequence too. The inmates and comings received no real medical care for disease or addiction. They were forced to sell parts of their own bodies right sometimes under force or threat of violence, to a system that continued to exploit them even as their conditions worsened.
Their physical and mental conditions deteriorated, and many of them will never know how many many died as a result. Another terrifying thing. According to some excellent research over at The Guardian, it appears the government of the United Kingdom knew that patients who were receiving blood clotting concentrates seemed to be at a higher risk of HIV.
Can we just say too that I think there will come a day where Kelly Duda will come back out and tell more of his side of the story about
what he learned through the documentary. And also there's been some international reporting on an incident involving due to testifying against alleged use of tainted blood by a pharmaceutical company in Italy that resulted in apparently him becoming very close to being incarcerated overseas for an extended period of time due to what the Guardian refers to as a Fascist era kind of remnant law that was used against him by an Italian prosecutor.
Yeah, this is a really interesting one because the cases in Italy that were related to this tainted blood date back to the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. I want to shout out Angela Giffrida gi U F f r d A writing for The Guardian, who knows that in speaking with Doudah himself, our journalist notes that something really
strange happened during his testimony. So in December twenty seventeen, he travels to Naples and he is a witness for the prosecution in this manslaughter trial against a guy who was the former chief of the Health Ministries pharmaceutical division, et cetera, et cetera. The main antagonist here is something called the Marcushi Group and they're a pharmaceutical company that is selling this factor eight stuff. So he travels there into Naples and the prosecution, the people he's a witness for,
sink and undermine his testimony. It feels very very crooked. That's not what prosecutors are supposed to do to their witnesses.
No, that's right.
And also I don't think maybe we didn't mention this clearly enough, but I do just want to point out that these products were sold internationally and this is directly as a result of the case that he was investigating in Arkansas. Like, so that factor eight that may you know have been used been created using the tainted blood from Arkansas prison system could well have made its way into international hands.
Guys, just when thinking about this political corruption, I'm just doing some of the calculations for like nineteen eighty three dollars, and if what Kelly do To states in his documentary that this system was making around seven million dollars a year for the Department of Corrections and HMA and all these groups, that would be a little over twenty one
million dollars in twenty four dollars. So, like, just imagine having access to that amount of money where you don't really have to pay anything, right, and you're just generating that kind of cash. Even if you're giving away ten percent of that to the inmates and to other people along the way, maybe twenty percent, that's still cam pain donation money that's like free. You don't have to do anything with that's money that grease's wheels for you as a politician.
I was going to ask yes. I was also going to ask, you know, prison labor is not outlawed, despite XPOSA documentaries like the Thirteenth and all of the issues that we've discussed. I think there's a lot more eyeballs on it. But Ben, in your research, if you found if there are any programs like this remaining where there are, like if I was to get a blood transfusion, would it be possible that it might have come from an inmate run blood clinic.
The regulations are much tighter now, more above board. In nineteen ninety four, Arkansas became Arkansas stopped selling plasma taken from prisoners. They were the last state to do so. So good on you eventually, Arkansas. As we record today, we're happy to note this is not the end of the story. Kelly Doudah's investigations continue. As you had mentioned earlier, Noel, there is more to come in the meantime. Thank you as always for tuning in, fellow conspiracy realist. We would
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