The Food and Drug Administration is easing restrictions that have blocked sexually active gay men from donating blood.
The agency announced on Thursday that it is revising recommendations in several guidances, citing “unprecedented challenges to the U.S. blood supply” during the coronavirus pandemic. The changes are being implemented immediately.
The FDA said it is changing its recommended deferral period for men who have had sex with another man from 12 months to three months.
Yearlong deferral periods also decreased to three months for female donors who have had sex with a man who had sex with another man and people with recent tattoos and piercings.
Restrictions have also been loosened for donors who traveled to malaria-endemic areas and people who spent time in certain European countries, or on military bases in Europe, who were previously considered to have been exposed to a potential risk of transmission of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
The medical community is grappling with a shortage of donations as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has pushed guidelines encouraging U.S. citizens to stay indoors and away from large groups of people designed to mitigate the spread of the virus.
Donor drives have been canceled as a result of the recommendations and last month the Red Cross said it was experiencing a “severe blood shortage.” As of March 17, the group estimated they had been shorted around 86,000 donations because of the cancellation of around 2,700 blood drives.
“As of this week, we’ve started shorting all our hospital customers to 75% of what they’ve requested, and we’ll evaluate pretty quickly if we need to take that down to 50%,” Chris Hrouda, president of Biomedical Services for the Red Cross, said at the time.
The federal government officially lifted its decades-old ban against gay and bisexual men donating blood in late 2015. Starting in 1985, the agency recommended that blood banks not take donations from men who had had sex with another man, even one time, since 1977, according to an agency regulatory guidance document.
The ban had been in place to reduce the risk of gay men transmitting HIV, but the agency’s thinking changed over time. Gay rights advocacy groups called the program discriminatory and criticized the one-year abstinence requirement.
Last week, 15 Democratic senators sent a letter to the FDA, urging the federal government to “shift away from antiquated and stigmatizing donation policies” in order to make up for the shortage.
The group, which included former 2020 presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar, wrote that “a time-based deferral policy is not scientifically sound, continues to effectively exclude many healthy gay and bisexual men, and does not meet the urgent demands of the moment.”
Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who pleaded for younger people to donate blood during the crisis while he was speaking at the White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing on March 19, noted in a tweet that the United Kingdom and Canada have adopted similar deferral policies and have seen no changes in the safety of their blood supply.
“These changes are scientifically based, safe, and will save lives!” he tweeted.
