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Imagine this for a moment. You’re sitting in a reclining chair, the low, rhythmic hum of a... Imagine this for a moment. You’re sitting in a reclining chair, the low, rhythmic hum of an apheresis machine your only soundtrack. A needle is in your arm, and you’re watching your own life force—your blood—travel through a clear tube into a complex dance of centrifuges and filters. The machine separates the straw-colored liquid gold, the blood plasma, and returns the red cells to you. You do this for hours. You do this for years. Why? Because you believe you are giving a pure, untainted gift. You believe you’re part of a sacred trust.
People like Peter Johnson and Mike Horgan in Canada are living this reality. Horgan has done it over 1,000 times. He’s a hero, plain and simple. They donate because they understand the profound power of plasma donation. This isn’t just a fluid; it's the raw material for life-saving medicines that treat trauma, immune disorders, and more. They give a piece of themselves, trusting the system to be a worthy steward of that gift.
Then, one day, they find out it’s not that simple. They learn that the non-profit they trust, Canadian Blood Services, has struck a deal with a multinational pharmaceutical giant, Grifols. And suddenly, the byproducts of their selfless donations are being used to manufacture for-profit medicines sold on the international market. The system they believed in has a back door they never knew existed. When I first read about this, about donors who have given their literal selves for decades finding this out from a news report—Blood donors surprised Canadian plasma products being sold abroad—I honestly just sat back in my chair, speechless. It's a profound betrayal of the human spirit.
The Ghost in the Machine
The whole affair, as one advocate put it, "doesn't pass the smell test." And he's right. In 2022, Canadian Blood Services makes a deal with Grifols plasma to help shore up the domestic supply of certain medications. Fine. But then, in February 2025, the deal quietly expands. Now, Grifols can use the valuable byproducts from Canadian plasma to create other medicines, like albumin, for sale to other countries. The revenue, CBS says, helps offset costs.
But here’s the kicker: the donors had no idea. These men and women, who roll up their sleeves weekly out of pure altruism, were unknowingly fueling a for-profit enterprise. They thought they were filling a community well, but it turns out a portion was being siphoned off to a corporate pipeline.
This isn't just a Canadian problem. This is a story about the fundamental clash between analog systems of trust and the complex, often opaque, realities of modern global commerce. The current system for managing precious biological resources is like an old plumbing network made of lead pipes and sealed with handshake deals. We pour this incredibly pure, life-giving water—the donations—in one end, but we have no real way to track its journey. We don't know how much is lost to "byproducts," where the side-pipes are, or who is profiting from the overflow. It relies entirely on us believing the people in charge are doing the right thing, even when the doors are closed.
Is it any wonder that trust is eroding? What happens when the next generation of potential donors sees this? Do they still show up to the plasma center with the same faith? Or do they see a system that’s been compromised?
A System Built on Trust, Not Code
The outrage here is righteous, but focusing only on this one deal misses the bigger picture. The real villain isn’t a single company; it’s the antiquity of the system itself. We are trying to manage a 21st-century supply chain with a 20th-century mindset of paper trails and institutional opacity. The problem is that the system is built on trust, which is fragile, instead of on code, which is verifiable.
So let’s ask a different kind of question. What if we could build a new one?
Imagine a system where every plasma donation is tokenized on a distributed ledger—don't get scared by the jargon, in simpler terms, it just means a secure, shared, and transparent digital record book that can’t be secretly altered. When you donate plasma, you’re given a unique, anonymous digital marker for your donation. You couldn’t see who it goes to, of course, that's a critical privacy barrier. But you could see its journey. You could see it get logged at the fractionation facility. You could see it allocated for a specific medical product. You could see, with absolute certainty, that your gift was used exactly as intended.
This isn't science fiction. The technology to do this exists right now. A system like this would mean that backroom deals and quiet expansions of contracts would become impossible because any change to the flow of resources would be visible on the ledger for auditors, governments, and watchdog groups to see. The speed at which we could implement this is staggering—it means the gap between today’s broken trust and tomorrow’s transparent system is a matter of will, not technology.
What if a donor like Mike Horgan could open an app and see a simple dashboard: "Your last 50 donations contributed to the creation of intravenous immunoglobulin for 12 Canadian patients and albumin for 3 trauma victims in Ottawa"? No corporate ambiguity. No shocking news reports. Just clarity. Just truth. Wouldn't that be a system that inspires even more people to give?
This is the kind of breakthrough that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place. It’s about taking these incredible technological tools we’ve built and applying them to restore integrity to our most vital human institutions. We can build a system worthy of the gift being given. The question is, do we have the courage to do it?
It's Time for a System Upgrade
Let's be brutally honest. The story of Canadian Blood Services and Grifols isn't an anomaly; it's a symptom of a terminal illness infecting our most essential institutions: a reliance on outdated, opaque systems that are fundamentally incompatible with the digital age. We're asking people to perform an act of pure, selfless trust, and in return, we're giving them a black box. It’s an unacceptable bargain. We have the tools to build systems based on verifiable truth instead of blind faith. We can create supply chains for everything from blood plasma to organ donation that are as clear and honorable as the intentions of the people who sustain them. The technology is here. All that's missing is the will to flip the switch.