American TV show host, Andy Cohen is speaking out about how he has strong COVID-19 antibodies but is restricted from donating them because he’s gay.
Cohen revealed he tested positive for the virus on March 20 but has fully recovered since then.
During an appearance on “The View” on Tuesday, July 28 the Bravo TV host said he’s learned he has “robust” antibodies since recovering from COVID-19.
“I had another test last week for COVID and to see what my antibodies were,” he said in the interview. “The doctor said, ‘Oh my God, your antibodies are so robust,’ which she found to be unusual four months after having originally tested positive for COVID.”
The TV host said he signed up for a program with Mount Sinai to donate his COVID-19 antibodies but the FDA restricted him from donating them because he did not meet the requirements to donate as a gay man.
“Once again, I thought, ‘What a loss. Here I have these robust antibodies, and I can’t share my plasma and possibly help anybody,'” he added.
“I was hurt,” he said. “I just thought, ‘Well, this is crazy.’ Technology has come so far that you’ve got to be looking at this.”
Andy Cohen called the FDA rules on gay men donating plasma for COVID-19 ‘discriminatory’ after being ‘ineligible’ to donate plasma ‘because I’m a gay man’
Back in April, the FDA updated its policies to require that men abstain from sex with other men for three months before donating blood.
The restriction for gay men was first implemented as the HIV/AIDS crisis unfolded in the 1980s when limited testing technology existed to screen blood for HIV. In 1983, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) implemented a lifetime ban on blood donations from all men who had sex with men.
The policy was revised in 2015 to a one-year restriction but in April 2020, the FDA revised it again to three-months.
