Blood Money : The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry

A "haunting" (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can't Even ) and deeply personal investigation of an underground for-profit medical industry and the American underclass it drains for blood and profit. Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she'd found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America's most vulnerable. So begins McLaughlin's ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing an industry that targets America's most economically vulnerable for immense profit. Assigned to work in China, McLaughlin hesitated to utilize that country's scandal-plagued plasma supply—outbreaks throughout the 1990s and early 2000s struck thousands with blood-borne diseases as impoverished areas of the country were milked for blood with reckless abandon. Instead, McLaughlin becomes her own runner, hiding American plasma in her luggage during trips from the United States to China. She finishes the job, but never could get the plasma story out of her head. Suspicions become certainties when a source from the past, a visiting Chinese researcher, warns McLaughlin of troubling echoes between America's domestic plasma supply chain and the one she'd seen spin out into chaos in China. Blood Money shares McLaughlin's decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit—a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. She investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America's southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay. McLaughlin's findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the suffering of others. Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin's personal battle to overcome illness as a working American with an electrifying exposé of capitalism run amok in a searing portrait that shows what happens when big business is allowed to feed unchecked on those least empowered to fight back. A "haunting" (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can't Even ) and deeply personal investigation of an underground for-profit medical industry and the American underclass it drains for blood and profit. Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she'd found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America's most vulnerable. So begins McLaughlin's ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing a "vampiric real-life story of modern-day greed" (Leah Sottile, host of Bundyville ). Assigned to work in China, where the plasma supply had been rocked by numerous scandals, McLaughlin hid American plasma in her luggage during trips between the two countries. And when she was warned by a Chinese researcher of troubling echoes between America's domestic plasma supply chain and the one she'd seen spin out into chaos in China, she knew she had to dig deeper. Blood Money shares McLaughlin's decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit—a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. She investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America's southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay. This "captivating and anguished exposé" ( Publishers Weekly ) weaves together McLaughlin's personal battle to overcome illness while also facing her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation with an electrifying portrait of big business run amok. "Bad Blood meets Dreamland in this kaleidoscopic investigation into the shadowy and vampiric blood business and the dangerous limits of demand for the crucial resource that runs through our very veins. Every year, about twenty million Americans sell blood plasma for cash in a barely regulated market dominated by private industry and off-the-grid trafficking. These commercial efforts prey on an insatiable market for medical and scientific innovation fed from the veins of some of the country's most marginalized communities, such as undocumented immigrants and residents of poverty-stricken Flint, Michigan. We are often told that "blood donations" are used to save lives, but blood plasma, a component of whole blood, has become a precious commercial good. Blood plasma is collected and marketed by private industry, with the United States one of just five nations on the planet that have not yet banned the practice of pay-for-plasma giving. This precious resource is used for everything from expensive and unproven age-reversing treatments to costly and experimental cures for novel diseases like COVID-19. Based on a cross-country investigation into the plasma-giving capitals of the country, in-depth research into the blood industry, and her personal experience as a beneficiary of plasma-derived treatment for a rare condition, Kathleen McLaughlin's Blood Money reveals the underhanded machinations and unbalanced power structures of the blood industry. Taking us from China's blood black market to Silicon Valley's shadowy tech startups, this is an unforgettable inside look at an industry many of us had no idea even existed. Blood Money is an electrifying exposé that demonstrates the shadowy overlap between big medicine and big business and paints a searing portrait of the extent to which American industry feeds on the country's most vulnerable"-- Provided by publisher