Putin will return money for blood

Today, Vladimir Putin instructed the Minister of Health Veronika Skvortsova to amend a new, reasonable and progressive law on donation, according to which donation in many cases becomes free of charge. The president said that blood donors should receive money, because even a small monetary reward “plays a certain role”.

In this statement, everything is fine. And the obvious populism, and a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of donation, and neglect of the command to immediately correct everything. In a word, the king is good, the boyars are bad. Obviously, Vladimir Putin does not take into account or does not know that the commercial approach sharply reduces the quality of donor blood and components, increases the risk of hepatitis and HIV infection. In this way, they make usually socially dysfunctional people who are more often sick and less often know about it, and sometimes they simply hide the disease so as not to lose income.

World experience shows that commercial donation is more dangerous and less effective. Therefore, in all civilized countries, everything is done to minimize paid donation - and the point is not that donors there need less money. The fact is that donation cannot be a way of earning. This is simply dangerous for the people themselves. In a system where the donor receives money for a portion of blood, the recipient receives a higher probability of an infection with HIV. In Russia, recipients are infected through HIV transfusion and other deadly viruses a thousand times more often than in Western Europe (one case per 1 thousand people against one case per million). Few people know that donation is not commodity-money relations and not work, but mutual assistance, which can be successful only on a non-profit basis.

In February, shortly after the adoption of the new law, in Moscow and some other Russian regions, resolutions “On Social Support of Donors” were adopted, which actually contradicted the federal law and allowed to pay again for every portion of blood (and even more than before). Now Putin was completely ordered to rewind everything back. The next logical step would be to legalize the sale of organs. Otherwise, why do our blood donation is paid, and the donation of organs - no? In Putin’s logic, Russians should have the opportunity to sell themselves - at least in parts.