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Pretty sure I’ve seen a few sci-fi movies whose plots aren’t so different from the real-life Grifols blood plasma shocker that has been making the news recently.
The story in a nutshell: A Spanish pharmaceutical
multinational sets up shop in Canada to buy people’s blood plasma to sell into
the global market. Even though death from plasma donation is reportedly very
rare, two people then die. Health Canada reacts, Grifols shuts down its many Canadian
collection centres, and the unsettling details about giant corporations paying
people to sell their body fluids are suddenly the talk of the town.
Grifols arrived in Canada in 2022, signing a 15-year
agreement with Canadian Blood Services for commercial plasma extraction in
Ontario even though CBS itself has a strict policy against paying people for their
blood or plasma. (Things that make you go hmm….)
A year later, Grifols bought up a chain of private
plasma-collection facilities in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, New Brunswick
and Nova Scotia. And boom went the business, until two people died at the
Winnipeg collection facility and Health Canada stepped up with a raft of
concerns about how Grifols was running things.
Here in BC, we’ve prohibited the commercialization of blood
products since 2018, under the Voluntary Blood Donations Act. Ontario actually
prohibits the practice as well, but CBS chose to find a workaround to the
provincial law by setting Grifols up as an “agent” of the CBS.
What’s plasma? It’s the pale yellow component of your blood
that makes up about 55 per cent of your total blood volume. Plasma extraction
involves a procedure much like giving blood, except the person then gets back
the blood portion after the plasma is extracted from it. The procedure takes
about 90 minutes.
And we need that plasma, say those on the side of paying
people to ensure a steady supply for modern medicine. Plasma is used in all
kinds of ways – cancer treatment, burn recovery, immune deficiencies, emergency
care. Only 13 to 14 per cent of Canada’s plasma needs are met by donors who
aren’t getting paid.
But it’s loathsome and wrong to take advantage of people’s
need for money to extract their plasma at rates that aren’t healthy, says the
other side. It’s a corporate strategy for companies like Grifols to target low-income
people, and to leave it up to them to decide if getting paid for frequent
harvesting of their body fluids is worth compromising their longer-term health.
“Like in the U.S., these for-profit centres tend to locate in lower-income neighbourhoods, where
they have easy access to people who are most likely to need income from selling
plasma,” reported the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives earlier this
year.
Every attempt is made to keep people coming back. “Frequent
fliers” are rewarded with higher payments. People who donate twice a week get
more money for the second visit, and bonuses for bringing their friends in to
sell their own plasma.
Good health practice says once a week is the maximum anyone
ought to be donating or selling their blood. But Grifols is a multinational
corporation with profit on its mind, and the $30-$100 or so they pay out for a litre
of someone’s blood is worth thousands of dollars to the company once processed
and sold into a hungry global market.
“Individuals who sell their plasma to Grifols at least twice
per week for five consecutive weeks earn their way into the company’s ‘gold’
payment tier, where a client can receive up to $115 for giving plasma twice per
week,” reported the Toronto Today in
December 2025. “Come less often, and individuals are in the “orange” or
“silver” tiers, where two visits per week nets $95 or $105, respectively.”
Grifols also incentivizes the employees who collect the
plasma. Their performance is scored on the volume of plasma they’re collecting
and how quickly people are churned through. It’s a recipe for ignoring red
flags in the health of the people showing up to sell their plasma.
One of the people who died after selling her plasma in
Winnipeg was a 22-year-old Nigerian international student, who turned out to
have an enlarged heart that was not tested for and who died after several
visits to the Grifols collection facility. Not surprisingly, she began selling
her plasma because she needed the money.
The other person, never named, died of a heart attack. It’s
undetermined whether it was connected to the plasma donation.
The whole thing feels icky, conjuring images of a
progression toward prisoners forced to give up their plasma and impoverished
people harvested for their organs.
Yet it’s hard to get too up on your high horse when much of
the world counts on plasma harvested by companies like Grifols, which has operated
in the US for 24 years. The US provides almost 70 per cent of the world’s
plasma supply. The world is uncomfortably dependent on low-income Americans
being paid to give up more plasma than they should because they need the money.
On the surface, it seems inexplicable that a non-profit like
the Canadian Blood Service, in a country with a fairly horrifying blood-donation
crisis in its recent history, could stand against the principle of payment for
blood collection while at the same time finding a workaround for Grifols. But The
Globe and Mail did a
deep dive into the whole Grifols saga last week and explained how that bit
of weirdness came to be.
Thirty years ago when Canada’s blood-collection system was
being totally revamped in the aftermath of the Red Cross HIV/Hep C scandal, CBS
was one of two charities given responsibility not just to collect and
distribute whole blood, but the obligation to supply pharmaceutical products
for blood disorders, wrote The Globe. Much of those products come from plasma.
Buying plasma proteins and related drugs now costs CBS more
than $1 billion a year – two-thirds of its annual budget. The altruistic
messaging CBS relied on for getting voluntary donations (“It’s in you to give!”)
was clearly missing the mark, and the non-profit started looking for a
commercial partner.
Naturally, it looked to the granddaddy capitalist-inspired
plasma generator that is the United States, and brought Grifols to Canada.
What to do now? Grifols is gone, but Canada’s plasma needs
still far outstrip the number of people who are donating out of the goodness of
their hearts. Victory is ours in terms of shutting down paid plasma operations
for now, but that still leaves our country very much reliant on a plasma supply
extracted from hard-up Americans getting paid for their body fluids.
Feels pretty hollow. One day there’s going to be synthetic
plasma. Until then, we’re mining poor people.
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