A video on Twitter shows a newscaster reporting that the Red Cross needs COVID plasma — but only if you’ve had the natural infection. If you’ve been vaccinated, you can’t donate, at least not for the purposes of helping others recover from COVID with your plasma.
On its website Red Cross reiterates, “At this time individuals who have received a COVID-19 vaccine are not able to donate convalescent plasma with the Red Cross. The Red Cross is working as quickly as possible to evaluate this change — as it may involve complex system updates.”
While the Red Cross site doesn’t explain why they’re “not able” to use convalescent plasma, in January 2021 the Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society (RAPS) offered a clue to its membership after the FDA revised its guidelines on who can qualify to donate.
“With two vaccines authorized for emergency use in the US and others in clinical development, FDA says that convalescent plasma should not be collected from individuals who received an investigational COVID-19 vaccine in a clinical trial or who received an authorized or licensed COVID-19 vaccine, unless they meet specific criteria detailed in the guidance,” RAPS says.
Additionally, vaccine recipients must have already had a confirmed case of COVID, and be within six months of having resolved their symptoms.
“FDA explains that the criteria are ‘to ensure the COVID-19 convalescent plasma collected from donors contains sufficient antibodies directly related to their immune response to COVID-19 infection,’” RAPS continues.
“The previous version of the guidance, issued in November before any COVID-19 vaccines had been authorized by the agency, said that COVID-19 convalescent plasma should not be collected from those who received an investigational COVID-19 vaccine, ‘Because of the uncertainty regarding the quality of the immune response produced by such investigational vaccines.’”
SOURCES:
Twitter May 19, 2021
Red Cross February 24, 2021
RAPS January 18, 2021