Alex Armlovich on blood plasma donors and markets

From my email:

I saw your post about COVID blood brokers–My girlfriend and I had it in March and finally got antibody tests last week when the city opened the free clinics.

I inquired on a national plasma donor site, was directed to CSL Plasma in Clifton NJ, and a donor concierge from LeapCure reached out. They didn’t tell me what the compensation is (the CSL website says it’s usually ~$50 for normal plasma) but they’re calling a roundtrip Uber from my apartment near Ridgewood, Queens all the way to NJ, which is $108 one-way. The concierge said to reach out if there are any concerns with the first trip next week because they’re hoping for up to 2x weekly donations.

What I don’t understand is, why doesn’t the city’s antibody testing program directly link up to plasma donation? I had to go through a bunch of hassle to find out where to donate, and I think the information & coordination friction is a bigger deterrent than anything else. And why isn’t there more collection capacity in the city itself; the long commute seems unnecessary. If this is scientifically important enough to merit real donor spending from biotech, it seems like the city should make even a minimal investment in reducing process friction.

Maybe an integrated, frictionless testing & plasma donation infrastructure should be a permanent strategy for future “zero-day viruses” where convalescent antibodies are the only thing we have to treat first responders…

Here is Alex Armlovich on Twitter.