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"I just felt like I was finally able to do my part and it's a small thing to do that can make such a big difference."
The new policy is one that public health experts and gay rights activists said had been a long time coming.
Ban on gay and bisexual men donating
In the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, blood donations were not able to screen for HIV, which led to some cases of HIV via transfusion.
One way to make blood donation even more inclusive would be to expand eligibility to those on a medication called PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis, which is a daily pill containing two medications that prevent HIV-negative patients from being infected, they said.
"While we definitely don't want any donors to stop taking their medication because it's important for HIV prevention and treatment, but more data is needed to understand how these medications impact testing and eligibility," Dr.
Baia Lasky, a divisional chief medical officer with the American Red Cross, told ABC News.
Miyashita Ochoa said she hopes the risk assessment convinces more people not only to reduce stigma but encourage more people to donate.
"These questionnaires are intended to keep our blood supply safe and so while you may feel some discomfort being asked about your sexual health risks, we have to maintain the safety of our blood supply," she said.
"So please support this effort to move towards this individual risk-based assessment and understand that beyond just addressing stigma and discrimination, this is about education.
Testing could rapidly identify HIV in blood with more than 99% certainty. The medication, given to prevent infection and to treat people who are infected, keeps viral loads so low that they may be undetectable by screening, Adalja said. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, had entered the blood supply and was passing to people who received transfusions.
With each donation having the potential to save three lives, that increase works out to an extra 544,000 units on top of the typical yearly supply of 13.6 million units collected or potentially more than 1.6 million lives saved.
Ehrenfeld, an anesthesiologist at the Medical College of Wisconsin who uses blood products for his patients every day, said it was particularly tough for him to be prohibited from donating when his own son was born prematurely at 29 weeks.
"You always rely on the kindness of strangers," Ehrenfeld said, noting that blood donations can't be directed to a particular patient.
His mother, Sheri, suffered a life-threatening medical complication when he was born and needed a blood donation to save her life.
Van Bibber said he grew up understanding the significance of blood donation, especially because his blood type is O-negative and can be used in transfusions for any blood type.
Sheri works for the Red Cross organizing blood drives so his family would donate regularly.
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How new FDA rule allowing gay, bisexual men to give blood is making donation more inclusive
For at least a decade, Chris Van Bibber had been prevented from donating blood.
The 35-year-old from Salt Lake City, Utah -- who is openly gay -- was restricted due to rules set in place by the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that did not allow sexually active gay men from donating.
However, this past May, the FDA dropped all restrictions specific to gay and bisexual men donating blood, moving to a new blood donation risk assessment tool that is the same for every donor regardless of how they identify, which rolled out in August.
This meant that Van Bibber was able to make history as he donated blood at the American Red Cross Blood Donation Center in his home city.
"To sit back in that chair and to go through the questionnaire beforehand, and it was just -- I felt so much excitement and so much relief that we were finally here," Van Bibber told ABC News.
We can all do our part," she added.
ABC News' Sony Salzman contributed to this report.
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11 of this year, the American Red Cross declared a national blood shortage, stating the blood supply level had dropped nearly 25% since early August.While blood donations have increased since then, it can take weeks for levels to rebound, the Red Cross said.
More work to be done
Van Bibber said the response from the LGBTQ community has been positive with people coming forward to donate who didn't realize they were now eligible or sharing their own first-time donation experience.
However, he and others say there is more work to be done.
"And as it finally rolled out, and I read the requirements before I went to go donate, I sat there, and I'm like, 'This is how we do it. And this is about an opportunity to participate in a more just in a more right scientific assessment of risk. Although donations are typically low this time of year because of late summer vacations, experts say the problem is particularly acute because the work-from-home movement has made office blood drives less effective.
Adding gay and bisexual men to the donor pool is likely to increase the blood supply by about 4%, Ehrenfeld said.
"I think that we are moving to a place where our policies are reflecting better the science and certainly our expectations as a society to not discriminate."
Experts are also hopeful that more donors will help address the blood supply. At AABB, we believe that the ability to save lives through donation of safe blood products should be open to as many people as possible, irrespective of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
The patients had been difficult and the care emotionally draining.
Sitting in the room set aside for medical fellows, his mentor Dr. Rochelle Walensky suggested they finish the week by donating blood together. "But to be pulled out (of donating) was a really, really difficult thing to grapple as we were watching our son."
American Red Cross: National blood shortage due to climate disasters, low donor turnoutGoldstein also writes regular requests for units of red blood cells or platelets.
"Every time I do it, I realize it's a precious resource and it's giving them life, and it's something I couldn't partake in before," he said on a recent Zoom call with Walensky.
The policy shift, he said, gave him a profound psychological boost.
"For my entire adult life, I'd been told by government that my blood wasn't clean, that my blood wasn't worthy."
Donating, he said, was "a really amazing moment."
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare.
This led to the FDA instituting a lifetime ban on gay and bisexual men from donating blood as well as women who have sex with men who have sex with men.
"That was really based not on an individual person's risk, but more so on belonging to a particular group and some of that, at the initial onset, you could say was based on what we were seeing with regard to the impact of HIV on specific communities, namely, gay and bisexual men," Ayako Miyashita Ochoa, an adjunct professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, told ABC News.
"We quickly got to a place where we were able to test all blood donations universally for HIV.
That policy became outdated…and yet we did not see a change in the policies related to this permanent ban or permanent deferral," she continued.
In 2015, the blanket ban was repealed but the FDA placed restrictions that men who have sex with men could donate if they were abstinent from sex for at least one year. Amesh Adalja, a spokesperson for the Infectious Disease Society of America, said the policy still doesn't go far enough.
"The guidance and the questions should reflect the state of the art and not be holdovers from an older era where blunt tools were used because they had to be used and now they don't," said Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Current testing is so precise that the only people who might be missed are people who get infected with HIV while taking PrEP medication.
But until recently Goldstein, the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and Ehrenfeld, the president of the American Medical Association, were barred from perhaps the simplest way they could help.
They couldn’t donate their own blood.
Both men are gay, and gay men in America have been banned from blood donations since the mid-1980s.
Back then, it made some scientific sense to keep gay men from donating.
Robbie Goldstein donated blood two weeks ago for the first time in his life.
On Thursday, Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld did the same.
Both have devoted their lives to medicine and public service. In 2020, this was shortened to a period of 90 days of abstinence.
Scientists and advocates argued that not having policies that backed science was discriminating.
"I think it's safe to say that the policy was so incredibly blunt," Miyashita Ochoa said.
That’s why AABB has led efforts to make blood donation inclusive of non-binary donors and championed the adoption of equitable, science-based individual donor assessment (IDA) processes to determine blood donor eligibility that welcome LGBTQ+ blood donors, strengthen the blood supply and save lives.
FDA Approves Historic Expansion of Donor Eligibility
On May 11, 2023, the Food and Drug Administration issued a final guidance eliminating time-based blood donor deferral periods for gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) and women who have sex with MSM.
The agency now recommends a new donor screening process that uses individual donor assessment - a donor screening process that uses gender-inclusive, individual donor-based questions for all individuals - to establish eligibility.
AABB is committed to helping the blood community implement the recommendations as quickly as possible.
This page includes information for the public on current policies that apply to MSM, as well as the latest updates on efforts to expand donor eligibility.
The fear of HIV, then a certain death sentence, also affected public policy.
By 2005, the science had been transformed. There was no way back then to rapidly screen donated blood to ensure the virus wasn’t present. The disease was readily preventable and treatable.
Yet the policy remained unchanged for nearly two decades.
“It’s hurtful when you should be able to do something so selfless and so important and you can’t because of a bad policy decision that is based in old evidence, stigma and discrimination,” Ehrenfeld said.
New policy: Gay, bisexual men in monogamous relationships can donate bloodThe back story
In 2015, Goldstein was a first-year infectious disease fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital just finishing a rough week of duty.