Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Nol.
Speaker 3: They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer Paul Michig, Control Decant. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3: You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
Speaker 3: want you to know. Tonight's episode begins with a thank you.
Speaker 3: It'll turn into a thank you to many people, but
Speaker 3: our first thank you is to our fellow conspiracy realist Zach,
Speaker 3: who earlier hipped us to this story. We're talking about
Speaker 3: blood tonight, you guys, Bad Blood in particular.
Speaker 2: If you want to hear that original message, go back
Speaker 2: to January eighteenth in the feed here wherever you're listening.
Speaker 2: It's a listener mail episode.
Speaker 3: And as a disclaimer up top, this Bad Blood series
Speaker 3: will likely be a multi part, continuing thing. You are
Speaker 3: going to hear some problematic perspectives here, including depictions of
Speaker 3: drug abuse, graphic sexual violence, and discrimination. These, of course,
Speaker 3: do not represent our personal beliefs, yet they do form
Speaker 3: a mission critical component toward the understanding of Tonight's very
Speaker 3: real conspiracy. Here are the facts. The humans need blood.
Speaker 3: I know it's a weird way to open it, but
Speaker 3: you know it's true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's.
Speaker 5: Really the only way to get it is through individuals
Speaker 5: we're willing to donate it, and that apparently, much like
Speaker 5: the blood itself, is in much shorter supply than we
Speaker 5: would like.
Speaker 4: The reserves.
Speaker 5: That is, you know, it is unpleasant to do so
Speaker 5: it is ainful. A lot of people have problems with needles,
Speaker 5: so there's any number of reasons. Also, there are a
Speaker 5: lot of things that exclude people from donating blood and
Speaker 5: maybe would like to.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm, yeah, that's going to come up. We mentioned
Speaker 3: it in other episodes. We also mentioned it in like
Speaker 3: Strange News and Listener Mail.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of things that might be surprising
Speaker 3: to volunteer blood donors right and right now in the West,
Speaker 3: especially the vast majority of donations blood donations are going
Speaker 3: to come from volunteer donors. You're kind of you're like
Speaker 3: paid and some cheese nips and some juice, cookie.
Speaker 4: Cook get a fun band.
Speaker 5: So I guess you don't get paid for blood, but
Speaker 5: you do get paid pretty good for plasma, which we're
Speaker 5: also going to go into a big time right right.
Speaker 3: Uh. For mostly human history, blood transfusion was not a thing.
Speaker 3: Blood letting it was definitely like getting it out of
Speaker 3: you was definitely a thing for purported medicinal purposes. Big
Speaker 3: thanks to conspiracy realist and fellow ridiculous historian Saturday Morning Cartoons,
Speaker 3: familiar to longtime listeners, for giving us a great scoop
Speaker 3: on modern versions of blood letting. Do you guys remember this?
Speaker 4: Oh gosh, I don't think so.
Speaker 3: Wrote to us about a condition called hemochromatosis, in which
Speaker 3: the body absorbs too much iron, and blood letting is
Speaker 3: still a viable treatment for that.
Speaker 2: Condition, but you'd have to put plasma back in or something.
Speaker 5: Right, Well, wasn't that a question that came up on
Speaker 5: our recent polio episode? I think I maybe asked are
Speaker 5: there any things that blood letting ever actually fixed or
Speaker 5: was a remedy for?
Speaker 4: And that is a fantastic answer to that question. So
Speaker 4: thank you for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like it SMC was saying, or like you were
Speaker 3: pointing out, Matt, it's almost a filtration system, right, They
Speaker 3: take the blood out, but then they put the plasma
Speaker 3: back in, and plasma is part of what you would
Speaker 3: call whole blood.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and then theoretically you would you would grow
Speaker 2: create more red blood cells that wouldn't be infected with
Speaker 2: or wouldn't have too much iron attached to them.
Speaker 4: Then you could.
Speaker 2: Basically thin make by making new red blood cells via
Speaker 2: that plasma, which is kind of like I guess it's
Speaker 2: like the liquid through which your red blood cells flow
Speaker 2: and exist.
Speaker 3: Right, like think in terms of like whole blood being
Speaker 3: platelets and then plasma.
Speaker 5: But by and large, like the blood letting of you know,
Speaker 5: the olden times did more harm than good to rid
Speaker 5: people of a different kind of bad blood, a perceived
Speaker 5: bad blood that was the cause again, the perceived cause
Speaker 5: of whatever any number of maladies.
Speaker 3: And up until pretty recently, in the grand scheme of things,
Speaker 3: if you were human and you lost a lot of
Speaker 3: blood one way or another, you were going to die.
Speaker 3: And that's because it wasn't until the mid sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: early to mid sixteen hundreds that people even understood the
Speaker 3: basics of how blood moves in the body.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, just in terms of things like regulating the
Speaker 5: pressure you know, to get it to flow from one
Speaker 5: system to the other.
Speaker 4: I mean, basics like.
Speaker 5: That had to be mastered before they could ever try
Speaker 5: this stuff on humans. So I believe then you found
Speaker 5: a source indicating that this was done with dogs, one
Speaker 5: of the first successful blood transfusions.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, So in sixteen twenty eight, there's this physician
Speaker 3: in England named William Harvey. He's one of the first
Speaker 3: Western people to go, hey, I think this is kind
Speaker 3: of like you know roads. It goes in different directions
Speaker 3: on purpose. And then this leads to people trying to
Speaker 3: transfuse blood, but they don't understand blood types, they don't
Speaker 3: understand antibodies. It doesn't work very well until, like you
Speaker 3: were saying, Noel, in sixteen sixty five, there's another physician,
Speaker 3: also English, Richard Lower, who successfully transfuses blood between dogs. Now,
Speaker 3: how did he make some of those dogs need blood?
Speaker 4: Let's move off.
Speaker 5: Well, not only that, can you imagine the horrific missteps
Speaker 5: that led to the first success in this particular venture.
Speaker 5: A lot of dogs on the cutting room floor, let's
Speaker 5: just say just so.
Speaker 3: And the first successful human blood transfusion doesn't occur until
Speaker 3: a couple centuries later. In eighteen eighteen, and then it's
Speaker 3: not until almost a century after that that a guy
Speaker 3: named Karl Lonsteiner discovers the first human blood groups, leading
Speaker 3: to what we call blood types today. And then the
Speaker 3: first blood bank is established in Leningrad in nineteen thirty
Speaker 3: two Preceiege, by the way, and scientists the whole time
Speaker 3: are developing new types of blood transfusion. To your point, Matt,
Speaker 3: about whole blood versus components of blood? Do you transfer
Speaker 3: the entirety of a person's blood? Do you drive the
Speaker 3: plasma and just transfer that? Do you do a platelet transfer?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should just break it down. It is plasma,
Speaker 2: red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Platelets are
Speaker 2: the things that hemophiliac might need because that helps you.
Speaker 2: It helps your body suture its own wounds.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Plasma is like the liquid portion. And if you see
Speaker 2: plasma just alone, it is weird. It's kind of like
Speaker 2: this yellowy, whitish.
Speaker 3: Or it doesn't look like blood.
Speaker 2: No, it's air.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it looks like some other bodily looks like. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The red blood cells are the things that carry oxygen
Speaker 2: and other really important stuff throughout your body, right, the
Speaker 2: stuff that makes your body go. And then the white
Speaker 2: blood cells are the things that travel through that blood
Speaker 2: and attack the bad stuff that comes into your system.
Speaker 2: So it is all of that thing, right Ben, And
Speaker 2: then it just you break those part things apart. Some
Speaker 2: people just need those platelets, and you can use plasma
Speaker 2: to kind of carry the platelets with that substance.
Speaker 4: Interfuse, right, to separate the different components.
Speaker 2: Yeah, spin in the blood.
Speaker 3: There it is. Yeah, it's very very hot in that culture.
Speaker 5: And just really quickly, in case anyone was wondering, is
Speaker 5: we're probably going to get into too much of this.
Speaker 5: What happens if someone gets a transfusion and I'm sure
Speaker 5: this happened again in the you know, leading up to
Speaker 5: doing the stuff right of the wrong blood type, it's
Speaker 5: really bad. It causes reactions that most closely related to
Speaker 5: something called indo thelium. The red blood cells of the
Speaker 5: transfused blood get destroyed by the antibodies of the recipient,
Speaker 5: and it can literally cause the person to die instantly
Speaker 5: or go into shock and then die very quickly subsequent.
Speaker 3: Because your body is saying, who are these foreign operatives?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: You know what I mean. And also just for a
Speaker 3: completely unrelated thing that won't matter later. Do you guys
Speaker 3: feel comfortable sharing your blood types on air?
Speaker 5: I am sad to say, embarrassed even that I don't
Speaker 5: know mine right off the rip, and I know that
Speaker 5: I should, especially given a apocalyptic type scenario.
Speaker 2: Do you guys know, Yeah, yeah, I have. It's called
Speaker 2: M recursive. It's a very rare blood type.
Speaker 4: Are you joking? Yes? Okay, because he had so there
Speaker 4: are you?
Speaker 3: Know? It's funny though, because there is research ongoing into
Speaker 3: various rare blood types, and there is kind of a
Speaker 3: correlation between not quite genetics, not quite regional history, but
Speaker 3: there are some interesting correlations between blood type and ancestry.
Speaker 3: And there there are a lot of different breakthroughs in
Speaker 3: this science of saving people through blood transfusions. We want
Speaker 3: to give a big shout out to Charles Richard Drew.
Speaker 2: He is the.
Speaker 3: Guy who figured out plasma specifically and how to preserve
Speaker 3: it in what we call modern day blood banks. And
Speaker 3: then in nineteen sixty four US scientist named Judith Poole
Speaker 3: discovered something called cryo precipitate, and that's like plasma plus
Speaker 3: whole blood extract that you can use you can deliver
Speaker 3: to people with hemophilia, and it helps their blood coagulate.
Speaker 3: So hemophilia, the problem with it is your blood doesn't,
Speaker 3: like you said, it doesn't quite suiture. So like the
Speaker 3: kind of scrape you might get on your knee, or
Speaker 3: the kind of you know, like if you cut the
Speaker 3: palm in your hand or anywhere near a vein or
Speaker 3: an artery and you don't have hemophilia, then you can
Speaker 3: press on the wound and the blood will coagulate. But
Speaker 3: if you do have hemophilia, like certain members of certain
Speaker 3: royal families, then the fire hydrants just open and often. Historically,
Speaker 3: hemophilia was noticed in most in European royalty because they
Speaker 3: had the they had the best medical care of their day.
Speaker 3: This is not to say in any way that hemophilia
Speaker 3: only occurs in that population, but it is relatively rare, right, yes, yeah,
Speaker 3: it is relatively. I mean it's tricky too, because we
Speaker 3: don't want to sound dismissively. If it's relatively rare in
Speaker 3: a population of billions of people and it still impacts
Speaker 3: you or remember one of your loved ones, then it's
Speaker 3: still horrific. And there's one problem with cryo precipitate. This
Speaker 3: is kind of pure science, and it doesn't really have
Speaker 3: a patent, and it's therefore more treatment that is not
Speaker 3: super profitable. So pharmaceutical companies come up with a solution,
Speaker 3: something they can patent and monetize. It's called factor concentrate.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and really quickly, I just wanted to add we
Speaker 5: were talking a bit about blood types and rarity.
Speaker 4: The rarest of blood types.
Speaker 5: Is AB negative, with only one percent the population exhibiting that,
Speaker 5: and then another pretty rare blood type is OH negative,
Speaker 5: which is seven percent, but that is considered the universal donor.
Speaker 5: So it is actually the type of blood that is
Speaker 5: most desirable because it can be used in a pinch
Speaker 5: in an emergency situation.
Speaker 2: And according to Pfizer guys, there around two hundred thousand
Speaker 2: people who live with some form of hemophilia in the
Speaker 2: US alone.
Speaker 3: Right, and considering that the US is only three hundred
Speaker 3: thirty million or so, you can see the scale of
Speaker 3: the problem, especially in places that don't have medical infrastructure,
Speaker 3: and there are quite a few across the globe. So
Speaker 3: this factor concentrate idea, they think of it in terms
Speaker 3: of a product. It solves a couple of issues. One
Speaker 3: in a very soulless way. It solves a profit question,
Speaker 3: but also it becomes very easy to deploy because regular
Speaker 3: cryo precipitate and blood transfusions traditionally they come from a
Speaker 3: single donor. This factor concentrate is a lot more like
Speaker 3: mixed fruit juice. You know, they've got a percentage of
Speaker 3: other stuff, the.
Speaker 4: Percentage with concentrate right right.
Speaker 3: With concentrate, that's a factory.
Speaker 2: And it's important to note that it's not prefix. But
Speaker 2: the first part of that word, right, cryo. When when
Speaker 2: I hear that, I think cryogenics or are we talking
Speaker 2: about freezing? Yes, we are talking about freezing, which actually
Speaker 2: comes into play in a couple of well at least
Speaker 2: one of the major stories we're going to cover today.
Speaker 5: And really quickly, guys, does blood type play into the
Speaker 5: ability to use blood plasma to.
Speaker 4: Create this product? I think no, because it's meant to be.
Speaker 5: Is there a cryo precipitate for a specific way. It's
Speaker 5: like one size fits all, right.
Speaker 2: I think because you're spinning it down to the plasma
Speaker 2: that you're and platelets. That's you're taking out the red
Speaker 2: the RBC's right, and the white blood cell. So I
Speaker 2: think that's the difference here.
Speaker 5: So it's type agnostic. I think, is this just important
Speaker 5: to differentiate?
Speaker 3: Yeah, this factor concentrate. Because of this fruit juice analogy,
Speaker 3: it could use numerous sources, not just one donor. It
Speaker 3: could use material from up to forty to sixty thousand
Speaker 3: donors to make a single batch. Now, assuming all these
Speaker 3: donors are vetted, this can be a life saving treatment
Speaker 3: and a huge income stream. It's a global trade. The
Speaker 3: blood game is global, just like the organ trade or
Speaker 3: the red market. Check out our episodes on that. You know,
Speaker 3: it's a common need. You need to eat, you need
Speaker 3: to sleep, you need to stay hydrated. Every human being
Speaker 3: also needs a certain amount of blood in their body
Speaker 3: to continue functioning. So if you get a grievous injury,
Speaker 3: if you have a persistent medical condition, a trauma like
Speaker 3: an operation or childbirth, then your body will find itself
Speaker 3: in sudden and dire need of fresh blood. So the
Speaker 3: creation of blood banks, if you think about it, it
Speaker 3: allows civilization to prepare for disasters in advance. You know,
Speaker 3: think about a huge war right now, like the Red Cross,
Speaker 3: as we'll discuss later, in the omicron wave of the pandemic,
Speaker 3: they declared a blood crisis because people weren't going outside
Speaker 3: to donate blood with the Red Cross.
Speaker 2: Guys. I didn't know you could lose almost half a
Speaker 2: gallon or around half a gallon of blood before you die.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not pretty though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it all depends on your size, right,
Speaker 2: but still like half a gallon of blood?
Speaker 4: Oh, you guys are recount that very briefly.
Speaker 5: I witnessed a serious motorcycle accident outside my house yesterday
Speaker 5: and was able to call the paramedics and help the
Speaker 5: gentleman with some towels and such and give them some water,
Speaker 5: and some folks in the neighborhood came. But this man
Speaker 5: cracked his head significantly on the concrete, was not wearing
Speaker 5: a helmet, and it was a lot more blood than
Speaker 5: I've ever seen before. And he did go to the
Speaker 5: hospital after being treated on site with just some bandages.
Speaker 5: And I'm happy to report that we saw him around
Speaker 5: the neighborhood yesterday. So I was shocked at how much
Speaker 5: blood he lost, and I'm sure he got a little
Speaker 5: transduc when he went to Grady.
Speaker 3: Happy to hear that. Happy to hear these in better health, right,
Speaker 3: head wounds do bleed quite a bit, surprisingly, so similar
Speaker 3: to the issues of Oregon trade and donation. There's always
Speaker 3: a chance probability that something could go wrong, and it's
Speaker 3: because the demand is all. It can go up and down,
Speaker 3: but there's always a base level of demand. We got
Speaker 3: some statistics from the American Red Cross that tell us
Speaker 3: every two seconds a person in the United States alone
Speaker 3: needs blood and or platelets. So you've got to have
Speaker 3: it banked in advance, right, you can't just you can't
Speaker 3: farm to table blood, not legally.
Speaker 2: Like as in like go out and get donations fresh.
Speaker 3: Like a blood bag and fury road.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, unless they're your friend and they're doing it
Speaker 2: willingly and they're doing it probably at your house, that's
Speaker 2: not gonna happen, and you've made them I would make
Speaker 2: them sign a way or two before you did anything
Speaker 2: like that, even if it's kinky in nature, which is creepy.
Speaker 2: I found out that's a thing. Don't look into that, Okay.
Speaker 3: But do check out our Modern Vampires episode, yeah, which
Speaker 3: talks about very similar things. The science is there. It's disturbing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And as we said, you know, different people need
Speaker 2: different forms of the blood for different things. We're talking
Speaker 2: everything from surgeries to like again, a hemophilia treatment like
Speaker 2: we're going to be talking about. I believe it can
Speaker 2: be used with cancer treatments as well, anything where a
Speaker 2: patient in a going through some kind of medical procedure
Speaker 2: may need blood for one of many many reasons.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and right now, if you look at just a
Speaker 3: snapshot again in the US alone, you'll see that on
Speaker 3: a daily basis, we're looking at what they call twenty
Speaker 3: nine thousand units of red blood cells, five thousand units
Speaker 3: of platelets, and sixty five hundred units of plasma every
Speaker 3: twenty four hours right now as we're recording. The blood
Speaker 3: and the platelets cannot be made synthetically, so you have
Speaker 3: to have human donors. And every year some people in
Speaker 3: the US do donate blood, about three percent of Americans.
Speaker 2: Yes, and there is, by the way, a massive push
Speaker 2: within the R and D sectors of pharmaceutical giants to
Speaker 2: create that thing. Ben is describing their kind of synthetic
Speaker 2: form of the constituent parts of blood, which is creepy
Speaker 2: to think about, but could be amazing. It could be
Speaker 2: a revolution in science and medicine.
Speaker 3: And now we have to ask what happens when this
Speaker 3: red liquid red market goes wrong? What we see here,
Speaker 3: the need for a constant supply, the ever present chance
Speaker 3: for a sudden spike in demand. It all adds up
Speaker 3: to one statistical certitude. There is opportunity for profit, and
Speaker 3: that means there is opportunity for corruption. With this mind,
Speaker 3: did you come as no surprise that things went terribly
Speaker 3: wrong way more than once? I suggest we take a
Speaker 3: pause for a word from our sponsor, check our blood bags,
Speaker 3: and come back for more. Here's where it gets crazy. Honestly.
Speaker 3: The first crazy thing is this is going to be
Speaker 3: a multi part series because there were a lot of
Speaker 3: blood supply scandals and conspiracies out there, and uh, you know,
Speaker 3: before we get too much in the deep water, guys,
Speaker 3: do you remember we did that show in New York
Speaker 3: and uh the there was all this branded stuff they
Speaker 3: don't want you to know, uh swag, and they had
Speaker 3: that drink.
Speaker 4: The blood bags. Yeah, that was a nice touch. I
Speaker 4: think Halloween.
Speaker 5: It was some kind of like blood orange cocktail, but
Speaker 5: it literally came in these ivy bags. And I got
Speaker 5: to wonder what specialty event caterer came up with that.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, I was I was thinking of the one
Speaker 2: in Hell's Kitchen and I was like, I don't remember
Speaker 2: that being a part of that movie.
Speaker 5: The Hell's Kitchen was cool too, and they made some
Speaker 5: neat swag, but this was specifically a Halloween event and
Speaker 5: they like had them hang.
Speaker 4: I think they were distributing them on those live poles. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it was.
Speaker 3: I was confused by that one. I was like, I'll
Speaker 3: hold one for the photo, but could I have.
Speaker 4: Several because I have a pbr.
Speaker 3: PPR is an award winning beer by the way. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So look, the other conspiracies we're talking about are things like,
Speaker 3: like we mentioned at the top, controversies surrounding donor candidacy,
Speaker 3: like discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, uh, traveling
Speaker 3: to the United Kingdom because of bovine sponge offm encephalopathy,
Speaker 3: Matt cow Right tattoos, right, Yeah, I.
Speaker 5: Was kind of giving my partner heads up on this episode.
Speaker 5: And she wants so badly to donate blood and isn't
Speaker 5: scared of needles, hence all of her tattoos which exclude
Speaker 5: her from donating blood.
Speaker 3: We're also talking about one of the oldest conspiracies mam
Speaker 3: and fans love it, the danger of prophet. You know,
Speaker 3: we talked about the old trope of someone donating plasma
Speaker 3: for a little extra cash or donating blood for cash.
Speaker 3: What happened would not sort of trade meets a literal
Speaker 3: captive audience. This is the story Bad Blood, Part one,
Speaker 3: the Arkansas prison blood scandal.
Speaker 5: Right And one thing we do want to mention it
Speaker 5: was it was interesting when our listener Zach wrote in
Speaker 5: about this topic. I think all three of us were
Speaker 5: sort of like this rings a bell to some degree,
Speaker 5: but not in like this was reported a ton by
Speaker 5: the mainstream media way. But I do remember a colleague
Speaker 5: of ours who I worked with on a couple of
Speaker 5: true crime podcasts, Laura and Pacheco, had at one point
Speaker 5: introduced us to this fella named Kelly Duda who made
Speaker 5: a documentary. It did a very deep dive investigative documentary
Speaker 5: about this very topic. It's a documentary that's a bit
Speaker 5: hard to find. We were able to get a copy
Speaker 5: of it and watched it and really really great reporting
Speaker 5: ben off Bank. We all talked about how there were
Speaker 5: some issues with the way sexual orientation is discussed, not
Speaker 5: from by the filmmaker, just by the subjects.
Speaker 4: This is Arkansas in the nineties.
Speaker 5: This this scandal took place in the eighties and so
Speaker 5: there's some problematic associations for sure.
Speaker 2: And it was released officially in two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: and Kelly had been working at least according to him
Speaker 2: in the documentary, had been working on it for five years.
Speaker 5: Such it really does, I mean, like it's a lot
Speaker 5: going on. The story evolves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's crazy to think just how the way
Speaker 2: human beings talk about subjects publicly can change. Just think
Speaker 2: about where we are right now and then just go
Speaker 2: back twenty twenty five years and it's completely different. So
Speaker 2: that is definitely a full on warning there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, heads up on that. One thing we can
Speaker 3: say is, unfortunately a through line is the dehumanization of
Speaker 3: disadvantaged populations. That's what you're really I mean, that's the
Speaker 3: umbrella term for what you're seeing in this film as
Speaker 3: well as subsequent interviews. In court testimony, our documentarian and
Speaker 3: journalists Duda alleges the following. He says, the prison system
Speaker 3: of the state of Arkansas made massive profits selling blood
Speaker 3: plasma from inmates for the span of thirty years three decades,
Speaker 3: and these inmates were paid a very small fee, not
Speaker 3: even real cash actually, each time they donated or as
Speaker 3: they put it as they refer to it, each time
Speaker 3: they bled, and these donations were then sold at a
Speaker 3: massive markup to these blood brokers, which is a real job,
Speaker 3: and those are human beings, not vampires, and they sell this.
Speaker 3: They sell these products through a series of proxy and
Speaker 3: shell companies all around the world. And it's a genuine
Speaker 3: blood harvesting scheme that would make any self respecting nos
Speaker 3: veratu go woo hoo at first, and then oh a
Speaker 3: little bit late because you're like, oh, cool, blood around
Speaker 3: the world on demand tight, and then you say, wait,
Speaker 3: what kind of blood? And that's where the problem begins.
Speaker 4: It does.
Speaker 5: And one of the problems begins as well with the
Speaker 5: fact that the blood bank, I guess we'll call it
Speaker 5: the program at this penitentiary is staffed largely by inmates
Speaker 5: as well, who are servicing other inmates who they may
Speaker 5: or may not have relationships with in terms of their
Speaker 5: ability to do them as solid if they want to
Speaker 5: get that privilege that comes along with donating the blood,
Speaker 5: even if they're technically should be excluded, Yeah, I want
Speaker 5: to donate blood.
Speaker 2: There's so much to break down, it really is.
Speaker 5: And I'm sorry, what didn't mean to spoil anything with that.
Speaker 5: I just I think that's a big part of the
Speaker 5: structure of the whole program feels really rife for this
Speaker 5: kind of thing that isn't even part of the corruption.
Speaker 5: This is just like a problematic framework for how the
Speaker 5: whole thing is run.
Speaker 2: Yeah, guys, should we just lay out just the very
Speaker 2: basic basics of the incentive or the motive here, because Ben,
Speaker 2: you mentioned that like the inmates could get a small
Speaker 2: amount of money or not real money, you know, almost
Speaker 2: like a credit to do that.
Speaker 3: So, like most prison systems in the United States, the
Speaker 3: prison system of Arkansas has some systemic, abiding and deeply
Speaker 3: disturbing issues within the way it handles incarceration. We have
Speaker 3: to just briefly, it may not sound related, but it
Speaker 3: is important. Just briefly, we have to talk about prison
Speaker 3: farms because a lot of times when people think of
Speaker 3: prison you might think of like a concrete bunkers brutalist
Speaker 3: architecture thing where people spend all their time in cells.
Speaker 3: But in a prison farm, you are sending inmates out
Speaker 3: to do manual logging, agriculture, even mining.
Speaker 5: Outsourcing industry is outsourcing this stuff. And we've talked a
Speaker 5: lot about how this in many ways replaced the institution
Speaker 5: of slavery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it sounds like slave labor, but it's not, according
Speaker 3: to the thirteenth monment.
Speaker 5: On paper, Thank you, Ben that was trying to come up.
Speaker 5: That's right, the thirteenth Amendment. There's an incredible documentary about
Speaker 5: that if you want to dig deeper up. But I
Speaker 5: think it's just called the thirteenth or thirteenth.
Speaker 4: But that is absolutely what's happening here.
Speaker 5: And we see it all over the place, but especially
Speaker 5: in Deep South kind of places that historically had that
Speaker 5: slave labor.
Speaker 4: It's like, oh, well, we've got this reversion of it. Now,
Speaker 4: don't tell you about it. It's fine.
Speaker 2: Arkansas is the only state that had a completely self
Speaker 2: sustaining prison system that cost the state zero dollars because
Speaker 2: they produced enough goods.
Speaker 4: Politicians love that, which is that's crazy.
Speaker 3: That's another way of saying they made money for the
Speaker 3: like say it it didn't cost the state. Is also
Speaker 3: a way of saying it was a profit center for
Speaker 3: the state.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they paid their fair share to stay in
Speaker 2: prison and all the work, right, and.
Speaker 3: These agricultural goods and these prison farms. The one we're
Speaker 3: talking about in particular, the Cummings Unit formerly Common State Farm. Uh.
Speaker 3: The produce, the agricultural things they made were in theory
Speaker 3: used to feed the prisoners themselves and then as a
Speaker 3: second tier other quote unquote wards of the state. So
Speaker 3: like the food went to orphanages, to folks in asylums
Speaker 3: before you know, the asylum system of the US got
Speaker 3: changed into its present state. But oh shucks, we got
Speaker 3: all that surplus.
Speaker 4: What are we gonna do with that?
Speaker 3: I guess, you know, school lunches, I don't know, sell
Speaker 3: that right, right, they probably did. And if you look
Speaker 3: on the app what you'll see is the Cummings Unit
Speaker 3: again formerly the Common State Farm. It's in Lincoln County, Arkansas.
Speaker 3: It's about sixty miles southeast of Little Rock, which is
Speaker 3: the state capitol, and it's a place with a horrifying history.
Speaker 3: Shout out to our earlier episodes on human experimentation.
Speaker 4: But if you look at it comes up here in
Speaker 4: the story. Oh yeah, oh.
Speaker 3: Exactly, so yeah. I mean it was kind of a
Speaker 3: lord of the fly situation for a long time, you know,
Speaker 3: kind of like what was it Angola in Louisiana.
Speaker 2: One of the ways the prison got away with such
Speaker 2: a low operating budget is because they just had the
Speaker 2: prisoners police themselves and they didn't hire correctional officers outside
Speaker 2: of the warden in a few other specialty positions.
Speaker 4: That is common.
Speaker 5: That is, like you hear about that a lot with
Speaker 5: these types of prison farm situations, and it often leads to.
Speaker 4: Communication breakdown.
Speaker 5: It often leads to like like you said, Ben, lord
Speaker 5: of the Flies type scenarios.
Speaker 2: You know, and I guess, I mean, maybe that's an
Speaker 2: innovative thing that I just don't understand, but it does
Speaker 2: feel like the perfect way kind of what you're saying
Speaker 2: to breed potential corruption at least.
Speaker 5: Maybe it's like when they say the prisoners are running
Speaker 5: the asylum. You know, I mean again antiquated terminology, but
Speaker 5: it is a term people throw around. It usually isn't
Speaker 5: describing something orderly and neat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like you were saying, Matt, these some trustee
Speaker 3: prisoners replaced the role of overseers on an development plantation.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: They're rolling around, they have firearms, they're quote unquote enforcing rules,
Speaker 3: but they become sort of like gang bosses, you know,
Speaker 3: running the corner boys. Abuse is rampant, any kind of
Speaker 3: abuse you can imagine, folks, drugs are very common, and
Speaker 3: the idea of drug safety or harm reduction is very
Speaker 3: not common. We're talking and dirty needles, We're talking very
Speaker 3: nasty stuff. Vectors for blood borne disease, dirty needles for
Speaker 3: the intravenous drug use. And as we're going to discuss
Speaker 3: more of, potentially, in the operations of the blood bank,
Speaker 3: the authorities, the few actual authorities there, they had to
Speaker 3: know these prisoners were victimizing each other, often brutally. Simply put,
Speaker 3: it was a place that Arkansas put human beings to rot.
Speaker 3: And you can read a number of intensely disturbing and
Speaker 3: true accounts of atrocity and assault over the years. It's
Speaker 3: just so many, in fact, that regardless of your stance
Speaker 3: on the prison system, you have to admit that the
Speaker 3: folks in charge of this farm throughout the decades, it's
Speaker 3: hard to believe they were either not aware of this
Speaker 3: or somehow not complicit. And to the point about human experimentation,
Speaker 3: right around just before the blood bank program is beginning,
Speaker 3: sort of concurrently with it, there's a guy named doctor
Speaker 3: Austin R. Stowe who comes to the who comes to
Speaker 3: Cummins Farm with the intention to use this facility as
Speaker 3: a test site for biological experimentation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it like the blood bank, we have to
Speaker 2: believe this, I think begins as a potentially greater good argument.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: I would like to test biological things that could help
Speaker 2: a lot of people on human subjects, and I, as
Speaker 2: this doctor, am going to choose prisoners as my test subjects,
Speaker 2: just the way the blood donation people who are in
Speaker 2: charge of the operation. When you can watch them being
Speaker 2: interviewed in this documentary that we watched, and they you
Speaker 2: look at their face and they're trying so hard at
Speaker 2: least is my opinion, to make themselves see the greater
Speaker 2: good like thing that they got sold or they sold
Speaker 2: themselves on at the beginning. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Folks like John Bias, the medical administrator.
Speaker 2: Yes, And in this case you don't get to talk
Speaker 2: to doctor Austin Stowe, but this guy comes in thinking,
Speaker 2: you have to believe in some small part, I'm going
Speaker 2: to do the world a favor by literally experimenting on
Speaker 2: these inmates, by giving them things like typhoid and whooping
Speaker 2: cough and trying to develop cures or some kind of
Speaker 2: treatment for those things.
Speaker 5: But it also sort of belies the fact that the
Speaker 5: mentality around inmates and incarceration, you know, is a dehumanizing one,
Speaker 5: and at least in this part of the country, in
Speaker 5: this you know example, probably on a much larger scale,
Speaker 5: these are subhuman animals that are not worthy of the
Speaker 5: rights that we all enjoy, and they therefore should either
Speaker 5: be put to work for pennies or literally injected with
Speaker 5: mystery stuff.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, one hundred percent right. These are test subjects
Speaker 2: in the eyes of this doctor and other people who
Speaker 2: did this.
Speaker 3: Right, Maybe he's seeing his name in a medical textbook
Speaker 3: several generations hence, and it says. It doesn't say here's
Speaker 3: the guy who experimented on prisoners. It said, here's the
Speaker 3: guy who cured whooping cough. Here's the guy who cured typhoid.
Speaker 3: So the greater good argument is real. And of course
Speaker 3: they were also injecting these guys with every version of
Speaker 3: hepatitis they could imagine. And the idea was, look, if
Speaker 3: we sacrifice these members of the population that we don't
Speaker 3: really consider human, then we can save the folks we
Speaker 3: consider respectful or useful. And this what they did was
Speaker 3: it was worse than Tuskegee in Tuskegee. The authorities ignored
Speaker 3: syphilis and injective placebos or treated with placebos. In this one,
Speaker 3: they knowingly purposely put these live contagions into these people
Speaker 3: and rolled the dice of the immune system, and the
Speaker 3: idea was if they survived it, they would generate antibodies
Speaker 3: and antigens that could be used to create cures, right
Speaker 3: the same way a de weaponized polio virus creates the
Speaker 3: polio vaccine.
Speaker 2: Dude, there was a doctor in the doctor in the
Speaker 2: documentary who ended up going through some of the facilities
Speaker 2: they were used by this person, this doctor Stowe Stough,
Speaker 2: and he tells a story about the dental chair. Do
Speaker 2: you guys remember this. Yes, they moved a dental chair
Speaker 2: that was in one of the old rooms where this
Speaker 2: guy operated, and when they moved it, there were one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty four death certificates that kind of fell
Speaker 2: out from whoops underneath it. And maybe I'm wrong here,
Speaker 2: but I feel like the implication I didn't understand if
Speaker 2: that was one hundred and fifty four human beings that
Speaker 2: had died in the prison, or if it was one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty four human beings that were being tested
Speaker 2: upon that had a death certificate pre written basically to say, oh,
Speaker 2: we expect these guys to die.
Speaker 4: We don't expect the last.
Speaker 3: I think it's unfortunately. I think it's a mix. In
Speaker 3: terms of potential, we don't know, because as we'll see, also,
Speaker 3: there's a strong implication the paperwork was cooked.
Speaker 4: It was it was.
Speaker 3: Actually got way. I'd be too kind. There's an implication
Speaker 3: that a lot of paperwork was cooked. There is proof
Speaker 3: that some of it was. This prison donation program, it's
Speaker 3: called the bleed program. And when you hear these guys
Speaker 3: talk about what's happening, they're not saying you could choose
Speaker 3: to donate blood. They're saying you could bleed. And a
Speaker 3: lot of people decided to bleed so that they could
Speaker 3: get their script that we mentioned earlier. This thing, this
Speaker 3: bleed prom is a direct result, a direct offshoot of
Speaker 3: this human experimentation. It starts officially in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 3: and then just three years later. The actual blood bank
Speaker 3: comes into play in nineteen sixty seven and continually has
Speaker 3: problems with its refrigerators.
Speaker 5: Right, look, just really quickly again, just shout out to
Speaker 5: Kelly dude, because this is original reporting, original investigation. This
Speaker 5: guy was very tenacious and asking questions of a lot
Speaker 5: of different people. And the part in the film that
Speaker 5: took me about in terms of what you're talking about
Speaker 5: is someone who worked in the program describing the smell
Speaker 5: of I guess deteriorating plasma. It has a certain smell
Speaker 5: as it kind of rots almost.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we talked about how the cryo was in that word, right,
Speaker 2: that's right to make this thing. So it needs to
Speaker 2: be taken fresh from a human body then frozen immediately
Speaker 2: in order for the process to function and to be
Speaker 2: able to be transferred to another patient down the line.
Speaker 2: But if the freezer breaks as is that I think
Speaker 2: it's what you're talking about, Noel.
Speaker 3: Yea.
Speaker 2: That blood it's like blood that's just laying around anywhere, right,
Speaker 2: and it gets a smell to.
Speaker 3: It and it's not like it's not like leaving pizza out.
Speaker 5: It is efficaciousness or yeah, it can be dangerous. But
Speaker 5: have we talked about how this result. There's the blood
Speaker 5: bank part, which is just run of the mill blood donation,
Speaker 5: and then there's a contract that led to the blood
Speaker 5: being used for that factor eight stuff. Right, we connected
Speaker 5: those dots that just want to make sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so after this thing starts in sixty seven, this
Speaker 3: blood bank storing up the blood from the program that
Speaker 3: begins in sixty four. The stuff they get from these
Speaker 3: prisoners is sold to the private industry with the you know,
Speaker 3: with the cosine and the green light of the appropriate authorities.
Speaker 3: Exactly right, the FDA, for example, and the connected politicians
Speaker 3: are telling each other, you know, this is a way
Speaker 3: for our prisoners and our prison system to make money.
Speaker 3: This will help the prisoners with the commissary, this will
Speaker 3: help the prison system not be a drain on the taxpayers.
Speaker 3: And if I get a kickback. You know when when
Speaker 3: Arkansas law, by the way, at that time, and I
Speaker 3: believe still today for bids paying prisoners for their labor,
Speaker 3: it definitely forbade it at that time, shout out the
Speaker 3: thirteenth Amendment.
Speaker 5: So what's the handful of bucks? Like it would be
Speaker 5: in what like lunch tokens? Like it's just not real money,
Speaker 5: and it represents something that you can use only within
Speaker 5: the system.
Speaker 3: It's like that song sixteen tons. Yeah, a company store
Speaker 3: or or dave Imbusters. You know, your dB power card
Speaker 3: doesn't work at your local taco.
Speaker 5: Bell, And it's unclear what one unit is actually worth
Speaker 5: in dollars, you know, American are pounds sterling.
Speaker 3: The inmates themselves would not have known, the would likely
Speaker 3: not have known what that markup was. It was this system.
Speaker 3: It is set up by that guy, doctor Stowe, and
Speaker 3: it runs from sixty seven to seventy eight. It is
Speaker 3: managed at various times from a couple of different groups
Speaker 3: of academics. However, it is always in cooperation with the
Speaker 3: Arkansas Department of Corrections. And this is where again our
Speaker 3: journalists we can't say enough good stuff about Kelly Duda
Speaker 3: speaking truth to power. He says, Look, these administrators knew
Speaker 3: something was going on, and they were just chasing and paraphrasing,
Speaker 3: they were just chasing the profits here and being willfully
Speaker 3: ignorant of the dangers. Is very poor supervision already historically
Speaker 3: in this institution, and the supervision doesn't improve. There's disease
Speaker 3: tainted blood and it's being drawn from folks were known
Speaker 3: to have hepatitis or who have already tested positive for
Speaker 3: HIV or you know, well, I do have to say it.
Speaker 3: HIV at the time was not very widely understood, right,
Speaker 3: so they but they knew about the hepatitis, and even
Speaker 3: if this blood was left out, even if the refrigeration broke,
Speaker 3: even if the people who were donating the blood were
Speaker 3: known to use intravenous drugs and share needles, it was
Speaker 3: still being shipped off to these blood brokers.
Speaker 5: And that was something that I think I was trying
Speaker 5: to get out earlier, at least we all were been
Speaker 5: talking about how it was the inmates also running the show,
Speaker 5: who maybe had relationships with the inmates who were coming in,
Speaker 5: wanted to donate blood, but should have been excluded from
Speaker 5: said you know donation because of any number of factors,
Speaker 5: like you mentioned, being intervenience drugs, having some of these
Speaker 5: excluding you know conditions, But their pals on the inside
Speaker 5: could doctor the docs for them and allow them to
Speaker 5: get that script. So it's literally an incentive to lie
Speaker 5: and the means with which to do it very effectively.
Speaker 5: And then obviously the higher ups aren't double checking behind
Speaker 5: any of this, and they're just shipping the stuff out anyway.
Speaker 4: But a lot of this is alleged.
Speaker 2: We don't want to, yeah, break let's break down the
Speaker 2: money according to inmates who actually went through the system. Okay,
Speaker 2: so when you walk in as an inmate to bleed,
Speaker 2: you were going to receive at least, according to the documentary,
Speaker 2: seven dollars in this you know cash that you get
Speaker 2: to use a commissary, right, seven dollars of blood that
Speaker 2: you were giving. Now, there was something called the blood
Speaker 2: tax or the blood fee that those administering the procedure
Speaker 2: would ask for if you were just coming in to,
Speaker 2: you know, get an extra bleed in to make an
Speaker 2: extra seven dollars, they would the person administrating what is
Speaker 2: that term, the person who actually drove blood flebottomus, the flebottomists.
Speaker 5: Those weren't inmates, right, Those were doctors or professionals with
Speaker 5: some medical training.
Speaker 4: Am I right?
Speaker 2: Or I think it was both. There's at least a
Speaker 2: few flebotomous who were inmates that were interviewed in their documentary.
Speaker 2: But they would charge that person donating blood two dollars
Speaker 2: of that seven dollars. So they would make just a
Speaker 2: tiny bit on the top in order to perform the
Speaker 2: procedure and would make necessary changes to the documentation if
Speaker 2: they needed to do that, and often they didn't need
Speaker 2: to do that, make any changes. Then that blood goes
Speaker 2: out and generally the Department of Corrections and this association
Speaker 2: through the blood program would make between fifty and seventy
Speaker 2: dollars for that one donation, So they're making money hand
Speaker 2: over foot in this in this scenario.
Speaker 3: And then let's consider additionally, Additionally, prison politics come into play.
Speaker 3: So there are ganglord, there are abusive members of the
Speaker 3: prison population who are forcing their victims to go in
Speaker 3: and donate blood or to bleed, and those folks are
Speaker 3: not seed. Even the script that they're ostensibly receiving, it's
Speaker 3: going straight to this capo. And this is an ugly
Speaker 3: situation all round. We know that we know that there
Speaker 3: was not adequate screening for disease. We know that the
Speaker 3: state investigators themselves, largely due to Doudah's investigation, would later
Speaker 3: confirm allegations that prisoners were not paid in cash all
Speaker 3: the time, but sometimes they were compensated with further access
Speaker 3: to drugs, which is just making a bad thing worse.
Speaker 2: Well, just the fact that it's on the honor system.
Speaker 2: According to several people who are interviewed, it is a
Speaker 2: small piece of paper when you walk in to donate
Speaker 2: for the first time, and or actually I think it's
Speaker 2: any time. It literally says do you take intravenious drugs
Speaker 2: and then a couple other questions and you just say no,
Speaker 2: and then you can give blood and nobody tests your blood,
Speaker 2: nobody does any kind of checks, and there's nobody from
Speaker 2: the administrative side coming down, say for like once every
Speaker 2: couple of months or even you know, we're talking years
Speaker 2: sometimes where they're coming down to check on the system
Speaker 2: because they can run it from Afar, like from Little Rock,
Speaker 2: and run the political side of it, and then they
Speaker 2: just they let it run, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And why wouldn't they, you know, because the money's
Speaker 5: coming in.
Speaker 3: And to put it in perspective, this piece of paper
Speaker 3: you have to sign a technically it's legally bind date.
Speaker 3: It's treated with the same amount of authority as a
Speaker 3: warning on a website that says are you over eighteen?
Speaker 3: Most people just click yes, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: There's there's no real crisis of faith for folks at
Speaker 3: this time.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know how many times of accidentally clicked on No.
Speaker 2: When I've gone to a website, I just like super
Speaker 2: fast click and then I just can't access the website
Speaker 2: for maker's mark for some reason.
Speaker 3: I've clipped a few just to see what happened. I
Speaker 3: should say click, but I also screen grabbed it because
Speaker 3: I am a very well adjusted person. Speaking of adjustments, guys,
Speaker 3: we just got a message from Paul Mission Controlled decand
Speaker 3: he says everything is shut down unless we go to
Speaker 3: a second ad break.
Speaker 4: Okaw, that seems fair.
Speaker 2: But we haven't even gotten to Little Rock yet.
Speaker 3: We're on the way and we have returned, so let's
Speaker 3: do that. Let's without delay get to Little Rock. On
Speaker 3: our way to Little Rock, we're going to have to
Speaker 3: walk through some of the bloody sausage making here. The
Speaker 3: private piece of the conspiracy that we mentioned, the private
Speaker 3: entity that contacts these blood brokers. It's not Arkansas Presents directly.
Speaker 3: It's a company called Health Management Associates Incorporated. What do
Speaker 3: we say about innocuous names.
Speaker 4: There's weird stuff going on.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, just ask Leonard Dunn what There are a
Speaker 2: bunch of people who are involved in HMA. They interviewed
Speaker 2: Norman Dixon, who was an employee. Who's the other person.
Speaker 2: There's a Congressman, Vick Snyder that talks about it. Who
Speaker 2: was Wasn't he a doctor for HMA for a while?
Speaker 5: He certainly was interviewed in an earlier phase of his career.
Speaker 5: In the documentary, okay, and he's being a massive apologist
Speaker 5: for the whole thing and even talking about the investigation
Speaker 5: after the fact and saying more or less he got
Speaker 5: nothing on me coppers, you know. And then due to
Speaker 5: finds him later and he sort of is playing nice,
Speaker 5: being like, oh.
Speaker 4: What was that thing again that we talked about back?
Speaker 5: You know what I mean.
Speaker 4: I don't know how he came off to you guys,
Speaker 4: but well there's.
Speaker 3: Also he still has nothing on my main guy again.
Speaker 3: I just want to mention him. In the documentary, John
Speaker 3: Bias famously said, you know what if I I'll tell
Speaker 3: you what. If I need a product, then I'll take
Speaker 3: this product we made. Oh anything else out there?
Speaker 2: Should we read that entire day? Oh my god, gosh,
Speaker 2: there we have the whole thing. Here he goes. He says, quote,
Speaker 2: you can take me and lay me on that table
Speaker 2: and hook me up. And after you tell me that
Speaker 2: that product came through our system, talking about the prison system,
Speaker 2: blood donation donation program, you can infuse that into me.
Speaker 2: I'm that sure. But you take me out to the center,
Speaker 2: some center somewhere, and I'm not so sure anymore. I've
Speaker 2: got more information on John Doe donor in my system
Speaker 2: than they do, basically saying I know everything about my prisoners,
Speaker 2: but I don't know the anonymous so and so at
Speaker 2: you know, actual blood donation made through the Red Cross.
Speaker 3: And he went to BAT because he wants to He
Speaker 3: wants to convey or message that he finds nothing wrong
Speaker 3: with how this was being handled and that any problems
Speaker 3: were not a result of the actions of the organization
Speaker 3: that he oversaw. So the question is, then, was it
Speaker 3: something else in the long chain of proxies from donor
Speaker 3: to end user. That's where Health Management Associates comes into play.
Speaker 3: Like we said, it was founded to run the prison
Speaker 3: medical program as well as the plasma harvesting program, and
Speaker 3: HMA sold each unit of plasma for around fifty dollars US.
Speaker 3: We mentioned we should say this part we almost talked
Speaker 3: about earlier. The prisoners are not getting fifty bucks a pop.
Speaker 3: They're getting that script the company store money. And even
Speaker 3: with the looking into it, we did different people don't
Speaker 3: have they don't have a uniform amount that was paid.
Speaker 3: It was kind of black box, which makes me think
Speaker 3: they probably lowered the compensation for more desperate donors and
Speaker 3: there was probably variants across time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it does make sense if they were selling it
Speaker 2: for seventy that they would give somebody like ten percent
Speaker 2: or less. Right, that makes sense to me when you're
Speaker 2: doing the math.
Speaker 3: So, speaking of our returning characters, the FDA in nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty two, at the end of the year, they issue
Speaker 3: a warning about buying plasma from prisons and they say
Speaker 3: specifically as the world comes to grip with HIV, they
Speaker 3: say specifically that prisoners are more likely than the general
Speaker 3: non prison population to be infected with things like HIV
Speaker 3: and hepatitis.
Speaker 5: But despite that, Hma contracted with Condinal Pharma Cryosam Limited,
Speaker 5: which is Canada's largest blood broker, and then Cryosan went
Speaker 5: turned around and sold the plasma to companies across Europe
Speaker 5: and in Japan and to an outfit called Connaught Laboratories,
Speaker 5: which company based in Toronto, and sold those very products
Speaker 5: that we mentioned at the top of the show needed
Speaker 5: by hemophiliacs throughout Canada, things called cryo precipitates. And then
Speaker 5: I believe the brand name of it, or at least
Speaker 5: a branded version of it, was that Factor eight, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, And we have to remember the vast majority
Speaker 3: just get this out. The vast majority of people, virtually
Speaker 3: all of them, who are receiving this tainted product, they
Speaker 3: have no idea of its providance. And also, you can
Speaker 3: make a very solid argument that the origin of the
Speaker 3: blood product is purposely obscured from the end receiver.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, and theoretically there are so many checks that it
Speaker 2: could have, could have and should have gone through that
Speaker 2: blood each donation, right, every time it gets sold, at
Speaker 2: least batches should have been checked in some way, at
Speaker 2: a sufficient in a sufficient way that you could guarantee
Speaker 2: this product is going to be safe for the end user.
Speaker 5: Well, guys, really quickly, I just wanted to ask a
Speaker 5: lot of this. You know, in the documentary is handled
Speaker 5: as allegations simply because no one will cop.
Speaker 4: To any of this.
Speaker 5: And it seems that there is an unequivocal evidence of
Speaker 5: where these bad units came from.
Speaker 3: Well, well, it's easy to pass the buck again, Spider
Speaker 3: Man teach other.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So there's another quiet part that must be said.
Speaker 3: Allowed alluded to this earlier, how much did the state
Speaker 3: government of Arkansas know at the time at least part
Speaker 3: of this unfolded under the governorship of a guy named
Speaker 3: Willie Clinton later would go on to be US President
Speaker 3: Bill Clinton. He always called himself Bill. I don't think
Speaker 3: he called him Willy. Yeah, slicks a T shirt version
Speaker 3: of him. Slick Willy is a weird nick name. But
Speaker 3: I know that that stood out to Doudah in his research.
Speaker 3: That stood out to I think all of us, what
Speaker 3: are you guys takes on it.
Speaker 2: I think some people get a little caught up in it.
Speaker 2: But it does seem like there is plenty of room
Speaker 2: for political corruption, for dollars to flow towards Little Rock
Speaker 2: throughout this whole scheme, right.
Speaker 5: Not to mention it's probably politically savvy and advantageous for
Speaker 5: your record to maintain a prison system that doesn't cost
Speaker 5: the taxpayers any money.
Speaker 4: Well, people like that in general.
Speaker 2: People do well, Yeah, and nobody really likes it when
Speaker 2: I don't know, the governor appoints a bunch of really
Speaker 2: close friends to the board of the Department of Corrections,
Speaker 2: which is it's illustrated in the documentary that that's the reality.
Speaker 2: It's illustrated that other people who were involved in the
Speaker 2: Department of Corrections, which just because of his title, Bill
Speaker 2: Clinton ran as governor like he was head of the
Speaker 2: Department of Corrections.
Speaker 4: Being commander in chief. You know, I mean it's but
Speaker 4: just want to say.
Speaker 5: Too, the appointing your buddies to these positions is super
Speaker 5: common and not in and of itself evidence that he
Speaker 5: knew what was going on specifically. But let's also remember
Speaker 5: that Bill Clinton was incredibly popular and he was seen
Speaker 5: as a very successful governor, to the point that he
Speaker 5: just blew the pants right off of the America at
Speaker 5: large as a candidate for president. Not to mention it
Speaker 5: so many ex sax playing yeah and pants actual pants
Speaker 5: being wow blowing. Sorry, jeez, Louise, Okay, I forgot about
Speaker 5: that'll scandal.
Speaker 2: But just think about how many scandals we've actually discussed
Speaker 2: in the past.
Speaker 3: You know, Watergate, not Watergate, sorry, the real estate stiff. Sure,
Speaker 3: there's also you know, clearly, political cronyism is a key
Speaker 3: ingredient for an governorship recipe, right, That's just how it
Speaker 3: works in the West, and i a pos it in
Speaker 3: many other countries. In the back rooms of political deal
Speaker 3: making and shadowy handshakes, evil can spread ignored, just like
Speaker 3: an infection in the blood. It can pass hand to
Speaker 3: hand just like a dirty needle, and you don't have
Speaker 3: to be aware of exactly what's happening to decide to
Speaker 3: be willfully blind right to an inconvenient truth. I'm doing
Speaker 3: an outgore reference whatever. So it's thanks his nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 3: the FDA says, yoinks, HMA, you can no longer have
Speaker 3: a license for all this dirty plasma you're making because
Speaker 3: it has hepatitie. But somehow, through some sort of political machination,
Speaker 3: HMA managed to get its license back just a few
Speaker 3: months later, it was able to retain its contract. Indeed,
Speaker 3: after a state police investigation, partially because Leonard Dunn, whom
Speaker 3: we mentioned earlier, HMA's president, he had juice, he had suction,
Speaker 3: as they say in the wire, and he was a
Speaker 3: Pine Bluff banker at the time. He would later go on,
Speaker 3: it's just to connect which dots you want, But he
Speaker 3: would later go on to work on Bill Clinton's nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety gubernatorial campaign. Dude, they knew each other. Did they
Speaker 3: just not talk about this part?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 2: Come on, come on. So for me, it goes back
Speaker 2: to people like John Bias and I cannot remember the
Speaker 2: other person's name. There's another person who was running HMA
Speaker 2: that was really important. It's interviewed. But I know John
Speaker 2: Bias was on the Correctional Department of correction side, medical
Speaker 2: facility side. But those people literally would come and visit
Speaker 2: every once in a while. And just imagine that when
Speaker 2: they come in to the facility to check out how
Speaker 2: everything's being run, they're getting everybody at the facility is
Speaker 2: getting a heads up, Hey, boss, the boss is coming.
Speaker 2: We need to clean up our act for the day
Speaker 2: or for whatever. Because mister Bias is in town. When
Speaker 2: he comes in, he may legitimately think that everything is
Speaker 2: going great, everything is as it should be.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: I've been in that situation on the other side as
Speaker 2: a worker, where you try and make everything perfect because
Speaker 2: the boss is coming around at.
Speaker 3: Least enough to sleep at night. He could tell himself that.
Speaker 2: That's I think that's exactly what it is, because it's
Speaker 2: that up the.
Speaker 3: Chain because every time I saw it, he says, every
Speaker 3: time I saw it, everything was spick and span, you know.
Speaker 3: Which is like a regional manager or a corporate level
Speaker 3: manager going to the McDonald's and say, well, I don't
Speaker 3: know what this thing is about the ice cream machine.
Speaker 3: They always work when I come out the South.
Speaker 5: But but I think what Matt's getting at and I
Speaker 5: completely agree, is that he's already given a little bit.
Speaker 4: Of leniency even on top of you know, but you know.
Speaker 5: It's he'sgether getting the heads up. They're making it nice
Speaker 5: as nice as it can be given the circumstances. And
Speaker 5: then he's already given them a little bit of a pass.
Speaker 5: But it's enough, to your point, to help him sleep
Speaker 5: at night. And this is what the officials point to
Speaker 5: time and time again.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 5: Look, see, the FDA folks came through said it was fine.
Speaker 5: It was I mean, come on, that's the ultimate passage
Speaker 5: of the buck.
Speaker 2: Because the FDA found contamination inside their samples. But then
Speaker 2: John Biason, the other head, said no, no, we don't
Speaker 2: have any contamination. We'll go and check. So they went
Speaker 2: and looked at the paperwork that was generated by largely
Speaker 2: inmates who were running their own system and making money
Speaker 2: through that system. So nobody has an incentive to tell
Speaker 2: the truth at any point, and the.
Speaker 3: FDA is not interviewing the inmates.
Speaker 5: By the way, No, I'm sorry, just to clarify, the
Speaker 5: FDA did do numerous inspections where they didn't find any
Speaker 5: tainted stuff.
Speaker 4: Right like this was at one point, they did.
Speaker 5: But like the point, the thing that the officials point
Speaker 5: to is the FDA had numerous successful inspections.
Speaker 2: Yes, but then they find one and I think it's
Speaker 2: eighty three when they find the tainted blood, and then
Speaker 2: it takes intol eighty four to shut it down. Then
Speaker 2: like six months later, it's back back again, as Ben
Speaker 2: is describing.
Speaker 3: And so the world goes nuts. Let's talk about consequences because, again,
Speaker 3: thanks in large part to Dudah's relentless journalism, the truth outs,
Speaker 3: and especially in the United Kingdom and then later in
Speaker 3: Italy which we'll get to, people found that blood brokers
Speaker 3: had sold this tainted Factor eight two folks who often
Speaker 3: had hemophilia right, and they needed they needed something to
Speaker 3: help their blood coagulate to treat their condition, people bleeding disorders,
Speaker 3: or folks who had an operation and needed blood transfusion,
Speaker 3: or or gave birth and needed a blood transfusion. All
Speaker 3: of a sudden they found themselves potentially infected with hepatitis
Speaker 3: and HIV. And how did this happen? In Ocean Away
Speaker 3: It's because the UK was struggling to keep up with
Speaker 3: the demand for this blood clotting treatment. Factor eight and
Speaker 3: so they started as a result, they started importing supplies
Speaker 3: from the US or Canada through a series of blood brokers.
Speaker 3: Blood brokers still very much a thing.
Speaker 4: It's a real job.
Speaker 3: It's crazy. It's like currency trading. And at the time
Speaker 3: again HIV, humans still didn't totally understand it. And to
Speaker 3: be completely honest, humans at this point are still trying
Speaker 3: to figure out how hepatitis actually works, how many different
Speaker 3: kinds of hepatitis are around. And by the mid nineteen eighties,
Speaker 3: you know mentioned ninety eight three earlier, By the mid
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties, it was clear HIV was bloodborn, and so
Speaker 3: people started heat treating these factory products to kill viruses.
Speaker 3: And it wasn't until nineteen ninety one that the screening
Speaker 3: of all these products became normalized. So up to nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety one, there were separate sets of siloed evaluation processes, right,
Speaker 3: and those credits might not transfer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And then you know, very shortly after they finally
Speaker 2: everybody got their act together, everyone decided on a way
Speaker 2: to fix this. Then the synthetic stuff comes into play,
Speaker 2: which is crazy expensive at the time when it first
Speaker 2: is introduced, but still, like we were talking about with
Speaker 2: platelets and other you know, parts of blood. There is
Speaker 2: a new serum, right. This isn't like blood in the
Speaker 2: same way a synthetic blood would be, but it is
Speaker 2: a serum that performs in the way that this plasma
Speaker 2: platelet combo would do.
Speaker 5: It's like that stuff on True Blood that allowed the
Speaker 5: vampires not to have to feed on humans.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, that's a dumb reference. It was a dumb show.
Speaker 4: But they did have a.
Speaker 3: Season one was good.
Speaker 4: Season one was I forget.
Speaker 5: What it was called, but it was basically like a
Speaker 5: beverage of some kind that allowed them not to have to,
Speaker 5: you know, drink real blood.
Speaker 3: I think it was called True Blood.
Speaker 4: I think it was called tue Blood. I'm sorry, that's
Speaker 4: exactly right that.
Speaker 2: I just remember those vampires were real into each other.
Speaker 3: They really liked j scenery and each other and campier,
Speaker 3: you know, yeah, fun obscure fact. True Blood started out
Speaker 3: as like a horror series.
Speaker 4: Novel. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: I did read the novels too.
Speaker 4: They're pretty horny too.
Speaker 3: I believe they were pretty horny. Yeah, they were a
Speaker 3: regular Balder's Gate three. But so we got to talk
Speaker 3: about one thing called the Creaver Commissioner Crever Commission.
Speaker 4: K R e V e R.
Speaker 3: The Canadian government puts US into place in nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: three to investigate the blood scandal, and what they found
Speaker 3: was quote, the shipping papers accompanying the plasma had not
Speaker 3: yet revealed that the center was located in a prison.
Speaker 3: This is why I think it's a conspiracy. They had
Speaker 3: simply referred to the sources as the quote ADC Plasma Center, Grady,
Speaker 3: Arkansas with end quote, with no indication of what ADC
Speaker 3: stood for Arkansas Department of Corrections.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: That feels very on purpose.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that is horrifying. That is horrifying.
Speaker 3: It just it makes it a little more difficult to
Speaker 3: It makes that, oh, we didn't know, you know, we're
Speaker 3: as confused as you guys. It makes that a little
Speaker 3: bit more of a tall milkshake. Twenty nineteen, the UK
Speaker 3: launches an inquiry, and this inquiry again only comes about
Speaker 3: as a result of Dudah's work and years of campaigning
Speaker 3: on behalf of the victims who claimed that the risk
Speaker 3: were never explained to them, which means they didn't have
Speaker 3: informed consent and that the scandal was being covered up
Speaker 3: by private industry. There are multiple examples. You can find
Speaker 3: great reporting on this, and you know, honestly, our hearts
Speaker 3: go out to these people. They were trying to do
Speaker 3: the right thing and they were trying to save their
Speaker 3: lives or life of a loved one, and they got
Speaker 3: touched by this conspiracy and corruption as a result.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are horrible stories that exist in that documentary,
Speaker 2: that exist in reporting on this since it goes way back,
Speaker 2: but since the nineties, it's been reported on pretty heavily,
Speaker 2: and it got quite a bit of a tension right
Speaker 2: around the time and just before this documentary was released
Speaker 2: in two thousand and five. But then it really does.
Speaker 2: As Kelly Duden points out in the documentary, it seems
Speaker 2: to have kind of fallen off a cliff for what
Speaker 2: a decade?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then the first things he says too, he's like,
Speaker 3: what happened to this?
Speaker 2: And then it comes back right, and that's when some
Speaker 2: of the bigger investigations come in, because that's when you know,
Speaker 2: everyone figures out, oh, this is a giant court proceeding
Speaker 2: that we have to go through now that we have
Speaker 2: to fight for justice for a long time.
Speaker 3: Right, the burden again is on the consumer, which is
Speaker 3: a dangerous part of the American narrative right now it
Speaker 3: went global. I mean there's another consequence too. The inmates
Speaker 3: and comings received no real medical care for disease or addiction.
Speaker 3: They were forced to sell parts of their own bodies
Speaker 3: right sometimes under force or threat of violence, to a
Speaker 3: system that continued to exploit them even as their conditions worsened.
Speaker 3: Their physical and mental conditions deteriorated, and many of them
Speaker 3: will never know how many many died as a result.
Speaker 3: Another terrifying thing. According to some excellent research over at
Speaker 3: The Guardian, it appears the government of the United Kingdom
Speaker 3: knew that patients who were receiving blood clotting concentrates seemed
Speaker 3: to be at a higher risk of HIV.
Speaker 5: Can we just say too that I think there will
Speaker 5: come a day where Kelly Duda will come back out
Speaker 5: and tell more of his side of the story about
Speaker 5: what he learned through the documentary. And also there's been
Speaker 5: some international reporting on an incident involving due to testifying
Speaker 5: against alleged use of tainted blood by a pharmaceutical company
Speaker 5: in Italy that resulted in apparently him becoming very close
Speaker 5: to being incarcerated overseas for an extended period of time
Speaker 5: due to what the Guardian refers to as a Fascist
Speaker 5: era kind of remnant law that was used against him
Speaker 5: by an Italian prosecutor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a really interesting one because the cases
Speaker 3: in Italy that were related to this tainted blood date
Speaker 3: back to the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. I want
Speaker 3: to shout out Angela Giffrida gi U F f r
Speaker 3: d A writing for The Guardian, who knows that in
Speaker 3: speaking with Doudah himself, our journalist notes that something really
Speaker 3: strange happened during his testimony. So in December twenty seventeen,
Speaker 3: he travels to Naples and he is a witness for
Speaker 3: the prosecution in this manslaughter trial against a guy who
Speaker 3: was the former chief of the Health Ministries pharmaceutical division,
Speaker 3: et cetera, et cetera. The main antagonist here is something
Speaker 3: called the Marcushi Group and they're a pharmaceutical company that
Speaker 3: is selling this factor eight stuff. So he travels there
Speaker 3: into Naples and the prosecution, the people he's a witness for,
Speaker 3: sink and undermine his testimony. It feels very very crooked.
Speaker 3: That's not what prosecutors are supposed to do to their witnesses.
Speaker 4: No, that's right.
Speaker 5: And also I don't think maybe we didn't mention this
Speaker 5: clearly enough, but I do just want to point out
Speaker 5: that these products were sold internationally and this is directly
Speaker 5: as a result of the case that he was investigating
Speaker 5: in Arkansas. Like, so that factor eight that may you
Speaker 5: know have been used been created using the tainted blood
Speaker 5: from Arkansas prison system could well have made its way
Speaker 5: into international hands.
Speaker 2: Guys, just when thinking about this political corruption, I'm just
Speaker 2: doing some of the calculations for like nineteen eighty three dollars,
Speaker 2: and if what Kelly do To states in his documentary
Speaker 2: that this system was making around seven million dollars a
Speaker 2: year for the Department of Corrections and HMA and all
Speaker 2: these groups, that would be a little over twenty one
Speaker 2: million dollars in twenty four dollars. So, like, just imagine
Speaker 2: having access to that amount of money where you don't
Speaker 2: really have to pay anything, right, and you're just generating
Speaker 2: that kind of cash. Even if you're giving away ten
Speaker 2: percent of that to the inmates and to other people
Speaker 2: along the way, maybe twenty percent, that's still cam pain
Speaker 2: donation money that's like free. You don't have to do
Speaker 2: anything with that's money that grease's wheels for you as
Speaker 2: a politician.
Speaker 5: I was going to ask yes. I was also going
Speaker 5: to ask, you know, prison labor is not outlawed, despite
Speaker 5: XPOSA documentaries like the Thirteenth and all of the issues
Speaker 5: that we've discussed. I think there's a lot more eyeballs
Speaker 5: on it. But Ben, in your research, if you found
Speaker 5: if there are any programs like this remaining where there are,
Speaker 5: like if I was to get a blood transfusion, would
Speaker 5: it be possible that it might have come from an
Speaker 5: inmate run blood clinic.
Speaker 3: The regulations are much tighter now, more above board. In
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety four, Arkansas became Arkansas stopped selling plasma taken
Speaker 3: from prisoners. They were the last state to do so.
Speaker 3: So good on you eventually, Arkansas. As we record today,
Speaker 3: we're happy to note this is not the end of
Speaker 3: the story. Kelly Doudah's investigations continue. As you had mentioned earlier, Noel,
Speaker 3: there is more to come in the meantime. Thank you
Speaker 3: as always for tuning in, fellow conspiracy realist. We would
Speaker 3: like to hear your opinions. We try to be easy
Speaker 3: to find online.
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