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There’s a crude but whimsical painting of an enthusiastic Dracula on a window at the Grifols plasma center in downtown San Antonio. It’s a Halloween decoration, but you have to wonder if having a vampire staring at blood plasma donors was in good taste.
Grifols is one of the world’s largest producers of plasma-derived medicines, and last year it reported a revenue of about $8 billion.
That profit was due in part to people like Octavia Rodrigues who come here for a specific reason.
“Oh for the extra cash,” she said.
Rodrigues said she donates twice a week and she even takes iron supplements to help deal with the effects. “I could barely stand when I got home. Any little movement didn’t make me feel good,” she said.
But Rodrigues said she needs to sell her plasma to get by.
“Hopefully if I get the second job, I’ll quit this. Don’t have to really come back here anymore,” she said.
Most plasma donors in the U.S. come from lower-income households.
According to the study “The Interlinkage Between Blood Plasma Donation and Poverty in the United States“ paid plasma donation has become a common economic coping strategy among Americans dealing with high rates of poverty and steep increases in the costs of essential expenses.
That’s what Luis Barberena said he’s facing. He said selling plasma twice a week is his “lifeline.”
"It could just be the job market. I’m not cracking the 40 hours that I need, so this is helpful to me,” he said.
Barberena works as a dishwasher at a steakhouse. He said he welcomes the opportunity to make extra money — but he’s not sure if it’s a fair exchange.
“Because it is money for just sitting around. But once you start to exit out, you see how much you are really giving them — how much you are really getting — I don’t think it’s comparable to what you’re giving,” he said.
A person selling their plasma twice a week for a full year will earn about $6,000.
Barberena said the plasma companies are making billions in profits so they should be able to pay the people a bit more.
“I just wish it was a little more, if they could do more,” he said.
But a new study shows the extra income that plasma donors get allows them to avoid predatory debt traps.
“What we found was when a plasma center opens in a neighborhood, the young adults there become 18% less likely to open a new payday loan,” said Emily Gallagher. She is a professor of finance at the University of Colorado Boulder and the co-author of the study “Blood Money: Selling Plasma to Avoid High-Interest Loans.”
“Every year a plasma center opens, it has about the same local impact as raising the minimum wage by $1 in terms of reducing people's likelihood of taking out paid loans, which tend to have really high interest rates and they cause debt traps,” said Gallagher.
Gallagher said the money paid by a plasma center is equivalent to what the federal government would inject into a local area after a major natural disaster. And this is happening year after year.
“In 2021, the average plasma center paid up to $6 million in donor compensation. we can conclude that plasma centers are injecting cash amounts into the pockets of local households every year,” she said.
Furthermore, another recent study found that the opening of a plasma donation center in a city leads to an approximate 12% drop in the overall crime rate, primarily by reducing property and drug-related offenses.
The crime-reduction effect is thought to be a result of both the legal income provided to donors and drug screening requirements at the centers.
Gallagher said these findings present a difficult ethical question about allowing the paid plasma market to exist in the United States. Some people object to the idea that people are being exploited into selling their plasma.
But, on the other hand, they are also being given an opportunity to make extra money without taking on high interest short term loans or breaking the law.
