Britain’s National Health Service is on a drive to recruit more blood donors. Predictably, Twitter is ablaze with whining homosexuals complaining that they can’t donate.
But can you blame the NHS? If gay men are really so desperate to donate their essential oils, perhaps they should stop being such massive whores.
The NHS doesn’t ban gays because it’s homophobic. It bans them because gay blood is so much more likely to have diseases, and it costs a fortune to do all the screening just to discover that yet another proud Mary is riddled with pathogens. I say “proud” advisedly, because giving blood is one of the most tedious public displays of virtue around. Ooh, she gave blood today. Isn’t she brave. Are you feeling alright, hon? A bit weak on your feet? Here, have another cosmo!
Look, I’m not trying to be offensive. But I know from experience how randy queens can be. I’m the most recklessly promiscuous person I know — with a fondness for African gentlemen to boot. Fortunately, I live a charmed life and I’ve never had so much as crabs. But I’m a unicorn: everyone else I know emerges ashen-faced from the clap clinic on a near-monthly basis.
The clearest figures on HIV infections come from the US, where although gays are less than 2 per cent of the population, they account for 61 per cent of all new infections. An estimated 77 per cent of diagnosed HIV infections in men is down to gay sex, according to the FDA — and the figures among gay men are going up, not down. That’s why there’s a lifetime ban on gay blood donors in the US. The NHS isn’t even that strict, by the way: they just ask that the donor refrain from sex for a year.
I get that asking a gay man to go without sex for a year is, in practice, the same thing as a lifetime ban, but whatever. Consider the fact that younger people are more likely to donate blood and that the largest increase in gay HIV infections is in the 13 to 24-year-old category. This isn’t bigotry: it’s a question of public health.
The NHS is broke, and it can’t test every single one of the 7,000 donors a day who come through its doors. So it has to make some hard decisions about which group is most likely to present a risk to patients. Who are these sociopathic monsters who want to put dying people at risk? Does an eighty-year-old granny in need of a bag of Type-O really need to be worrying that her local hospital is about to pump her full of HIV?
Even if the NHS were to test every blood sample, which it currently says it does, some HIV infections take up to 10 years to show up in tests. In the majority of cases, it only takes 3 months. But it’s a lot more straightforward to exclude very high-risk groups to make sure no other patients are at risk.
I’m perfectly fine with the NHS turning me down, and I can’t understand why my fellow homos are pretending they aren’t. Not, of course, that I would ever really consider donating a drop of my blue blood to others, because eww, needles.
And there’s another public health hazard on the horizon, too: what if those conspiracy sites are right, and blood contains a “genetic memory” that might transfer to another person? If I start giving blood, there could be a veritable epidemic of bitchy right-wing queens out there. It’s the stuff Netflix horror series are made of.
I think one Milo Yiannopoulos is quite enough, don’t you?