Part Two: How Tainted Human Blood Became A Major U.S. Export

Robert, who is looking better than ever these days wow what great hair, finishes telling Ben Bowlin the harrowing story of how the U. S. murdered thousands of our nation's closest friends and poisoned incarcerated people for a modest payout. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to the podcast that this is, which is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about how to mine prison labor for their sweet, sweet blood. Uh oh, hepatitis. That's the story we're telling today. Yeah, whoops, all heps, B C, all of the heps. Uh, collect them all, folks. Uh, if you're getting, doing blood donations with needles that have been used on dozens of other people in the prison. Anyway, Ben Bowlin, my guest today. Ben, ridiculous history, stuff they don't want you to know, podcast maven, impresario.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 0:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, how are you doing? How you feeling?

• 0:48Speaker 01

  I'm doing well. I got to tell you, Robert, I got a little bit of epaulette envy right now because your jacket's pretty sick. Uh, I got, I got a jacket like that, but it's, uh, you know, it's stored away for specific purposes. I apologize. I'm like some guy rocking up to the White House without a suit on, you know?

• 1:09Robert Evans?

  I mean, I live in a place where you get to wear clothing like this regularly because it's cold. So it's part of why I left Texas. I really like jackets and boy, very few places are worse for needing a jacket than Texas.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  You heard it here first, folks.

• 1:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 1:33Robert Evans?

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• 2:40Robert Evans?

  So, you know, let's get back into talking about, talking about blood, the big B. So, as I mentioned in part one, back in 1983, HMA, that's the company that is doing all of the healthcare and all, managing all the blood donation for the Arkansas prisons. They've just been shut down, but then they got reopened after some people who were close to the administration got put in positions in both the prison board and at HMA.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Oh, and HMA is Health Management Associates, Associates, Incorporated. What do we always say about innocuous names, right?

• 3:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's the worst thing ever. Yes, they're just killing people. You really want to just invest in a company called Murder Co.? Because Murder Co. probably just produces like cat food or something.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  So they're founded by, they're founded by Janine Murder.

• 3:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Janine Murder, you know, she's a great cat food scientist.

• 3:39Robert Evans?

  Of the New Hampshire murders.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Of the New Hampshire murders, yeah.

• 3:45Robert Evans?

  As I mentioned in part one, in 1983, HMA had sold a brrrrr chitinnit blood plasma for inmates who were known to be positive for hepatitis. Thirty-eight units of blood, to be exact. Now, one unit of blood, there's actually varies and I see, because it depends on like how it's, it's like, it's like roughly a pint, right? That's, that's what you should keep in mind in your head when you're hearing about a unit of blood. Now, in the grand scheme of things, 38 pints or so of blood that's tainted, doesn't sound like a lot, maybe. However, as I stated in the last episode, all of these are being mixed with tens of thousands of other blood donations. And so these, this, these 38-ish pints-ish of tainted blood

• 4:30Robert Evans?

  can wind up being turned into medicine for tens of thousands of people, right? Because any given dose of the plasma being given to hemophiliacs as factor VIII would be made from the blood of as many as 60,000 donors. And just one tainted donor can spoil the batch. So that's great. So from just 38 pints of donated blood, at least 4,000 doses of dangerous tainted medicine were made and shipped overseas. At least, probably significantly more than that. Many made their way into the hands of hemophiliacs who required regular injections of factor VIII. In 1985, the same year as Clinton, that Clinton's state cops cleared the company

• 5:11Robert Evans?

  of most wrongdoing, a UK hemophilia sufferer named Peter Longstaff tested positive for HIV. Now, because of the way this all works, we don't know that Peter's tainted plasma came from Arkansas prison inmates, right? Because you can't, they're just mixing it, they're not keeping track of, here's every individual whose blood is in this batch of factor VIII, right? But he'd been taking blood products, including factor VIII and factor IV since the 70s. And by then, Arkansas was a huge part of the US blood economy. And the odds that blood from Cummins Prison made it into his body are about 100%, right? Just given the way things worked at that time. His brother also suffered from hemophilia. And his brother Stephen Longstaff would be infected in 1986

• 5:56Robert Evans?

  and became one of the first people to die of AIDS in the UK. Given the hysteria at the time, this meant not just that the Longstaffs weren't just dealing with the fact that two of, you know, both of their sons had gotten sick and, you know, in 86, one of them died. But it meant that they also became the targets of mob panic. Per The Guardian, "During Stephen's final days in hospital, the windows had to be blacked out to prevent people taking pictures. On the day of the funeral, the family house was daubed with paint, which read 'AIDS, get out of here.' 'It was devastating to the family,' she, his mother, said. Pete himself recalled being rescued from his house by his GP and the police because there was a mob outside trying to get him because he had HIV."

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 6:37Robert Evans?

  So when we talk about how many people are getting sick, it's not just that they're getting a deadly or potentially deadly disease that changes or ends their life. It's also they're dealing with this kind of shit because that is where the culture is at the time, you know?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  The secondary infection.

• 6:52Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Of a, of a.

• 6:54Robert Evans?

  People being dicks.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Mass outbreak, yeah, of dickishness.

• 6:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  So we could say then.

• 7:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  We could say then that not only is this family being targeted unfairly through some groundswell of mob rule, but they're being targeted at one of the worst possible moments of their lives.

• 7:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I remember when I was in school in like the 90s, we had like school lectures about how like, yeah, there was a kid with HIV, I think because he had gotten it through a blood donation and you could still use the water fountain that he used. It wasn't a danger to you, you know?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Which might sound silly to us now.

• 7:32Robert Evans?

  Wild now, but no, we that I remember this. Yeah.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  You were there.

• 7:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Just like you were there at the JFK assassination. We know. We know, Robert.

• 7:43Robert Evans?

  I know who was there and I know that he is currently, you know, a well-regarded US politician, but Bernard Montgomery Sanders has a lot of unanswered questions about that. That's all we, that's all we need to say. That's all we need to say.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  All right, we're keeping it on air. Bernie, come find us. Buy some catalytic converters.

• 8:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So HMA ultimately settled with the FDA over the blood recall that resulted from this. Their share of the liability was about a quarter of a million dollars. Now we don't know how much money HMA was making off of this program in part because they weren't really required to like let people like some of the regulations about this are like, you don't really need to say in the sense that most companies do, but at least a couple of million dollars a year is probably a fair guess based on how like what the company that takes over for them is going to make. Now, the state police investigation largely cleared the department of any serious wrongdoing in their plasma problem. HMA was eventually given the go ahead to continue operating it with new safeguards in place.

• 8:45Robert Evans?

  Thankfully, the growing panic over HIV and the news of what had happened to the longstaffs in the UK prompted some reexamination. And even though they were allowed to continue in like 84, 85, doing this plasma donation program, in the summer of 1986, a hero emerged. And unfortunately, in this case, the hero was an insurance company. But like HMA's insurance company, after they, after they looked into the evidence was like, oh, absolutely not. No, you people are gonna get us fucked. Like, you're so reckless. We're dropping your asses. Right? This meant that the Arkansas prison plasma donation program was again forced

• 9:23Robert Evans?

  to shut down. And this is going to lead to some of the most, I mean, less irresponsible actions than we've had so far. So one of the things that happens, once HMA gets shut down by their insurer, the prison board, in which the guy we heard from last episode, Clinton aide Bobby Roberts, is a member of the board, they actually, they're like, they might come to the conclusion that like, that state police investigation might have been shit. And they hire an outside organization to do a better version of the internal investigation into what had happened. Now, the group they picked was the Institute for Law and Policy Planning from Berkeley, California, which is a lot better than having the state police do it. But the subject of the investigation wasn't the plasma donation program itself.

• 10:08Robert Evans?

  It was just the behavior of HMA. So, part of what they're doing here, it's good that we get this info, but part of what they're doing is like, well, we don't, we don't want to be like shitting on the prison system. We want to make this company who we already can't work with anymore into a scapegoat.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  So they scoped in and cauterized the wound, essentially?

• 10:27Robert Evans?

  Right. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. And this, this is how the paper concludes. "HMA originally may have diverted the Department of Correction payments to support acquiring plasma centers or to other purposes that may well warrant further inquiry. In any event, it was early in the five-year contract period that HMA established a pattern of contract shortfalls, and the ADC accepted them. For HMA, this must all be viewed as profit-motivated business decision-making. At best, at worst, it calls for further inquiry." So just like, so many crimes are going on here. Yeah.

• 11:03Robert Evans?

  Even though it has concluded this again, it's just blaming HMA. So the people running the prison system still want to make money off of blood. So the Arkansas Department of Corrections makes a deal with a new company, Pine Bluff Biological Products, a for-profit business. And obviously, one that's not going to continue the same problems. These guys are finally going to be ethical.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Finally, on the up and up.

• 11:29Robert Evans?

  On the up and up.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Someone doing blood money the right way.

• 11:33Robert Evans?

  Yes, exactly. Ethical, just like the ethical blood diamonds that I wear in my all-diamond chiffon. I don't know what a chiffon is.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  But, you know, yours is diamond-encrusted. That's the important part of the story.

• 11:48Robert Evans?

  Yes, and they're not blood diamonds. They're blood plasma diamonds, which is much more ethical.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Think about it. That's why I made my money off a platelet emerald mine.

• 11:57Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. Platelets make the best emeralds, I assume. So, Robert, Bobby Roberts, would later allege of Pine Bluff Biological Products getting the new blood contract, quote, "I think it was an insider Pine Bluff deal." Those were companies set up specifically for doing business with the ADC. Basically, people who were running the Department of Corrections went to rich, you know, entrepreneur friends of theirs and were like, "Here's what you need to do to set up a company to like, make this work, right?"

• 12:27Robert Evans?

  Now, I know what you're asking now. How much money was in this business for the prison system?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, wait, wait, let me do it. Hey, Robert, how much money was in this for the prison system?

• 12:39Robert Evans?

  The answer is less than you'd think. Here's the Arkansas Times. According to Robert's records, PBPP, reported collecting an average of 960 units of plasma a week in fiscal year 1986, calculated a conserving selling rate of $50 a unit. That volume of plasma grossed to propludimantly 2.5 million that year. According to PBPP's contract, the ADC was to receive $5 for every unit of plasma collected. So here's how the numbers looked in a year when the median income in Arkansas was half of what it is today and when the scourge of contaminated blood products was being felt around the world. PBPP's 2.5 million in annual gross sales, 350,000 went to pay inmates their $7 a unit fees.

• 13:20Robert Evans?

  The state of Arkansas collected 249,600 for prison operations and PBPP had gross revenues of almost 1.9 million. Now, that sounds weirdly small for this. First off, this is not all the money that's coming in through the program. But second, what's happening here is the state and the prisons are getting, you know, a little bit of this money. And most of that prisoner money is also going back into the Department of Corrections because they're using it to buy things from the prisons. Most of the money is going to PBPP. And again, this is a company that has been set up specifically to interface with the Department of Corrections, generally by people who had relationships with people in Arkansas government who were responsible for making these calls.

• 14:03Robert Evans?

  So they basically created a free company to siphon off money from the prisons, right? That's kind of what's happened here.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the question. I think all of us hearing this are going to be asking naturally, is this a cutout? Is this like a proxy to move or sluice some money through?

• 14:21Robert Evans?

  That there's, that's kind of, that's an element of what is going on. And there's also serious debates as to these numbers. This is what the Arkansas Times suggests. There's a, Sophia Chase wrote for the William and Mary Business Law Review that the value of a unit of blood to the prison was about 100 bucks and the prison kept half of that as opposed to like $5 per unit. So they may have, it may have been a lot more going into the system. The fact that the, the money on this is so unclear in its precise details is one of the things that's shady.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Sock the phone.

• 14:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Dictator. Now, even if, let's say it's about $2 million that PBPP is grossing. Now, it's gross not yet net, but they effectively have almost no costs because they don't build their own facilities. They are using a plasma pharesis center built into Cummins Prison for free. That's part of the contract. The Department of Corrections handles all utilities and all janitorial work. And it's also guards who are working, reaching out to prisoners to get them to sign on to the program and bussing them to Cummins, and it's still a lot of inmates doing the work. So really, PBPP is just skimming $2 million out of this program and handing it to some

• 15:32Robert Evans?

  people who have connections to folks who are, you know, close to the ADC, right? Yeah. So, as far as I can tell, all PBBP, PBPP the company did was sell blood without checking to make sure it was safe and pocketed the money. On paper, they were supposed to assume liability for all plasma products produced through this and ensure they provided staff to handle the draw and that those staff were licensed professionals who would check the product. But the ADC also kept giving them inmates to do blood draws and other work that by the text of the contract, professional PBPP employees ought only to have been doing. Roberts described the PBPP looking at the inmates as, quote, "sort of as little cows", right?

• 16:15Robert Evans?

  You'll hear this description a lot, that they're like, this is, these are, yeah, these are animals that we are mining for the products of their body. Wow. Now, by 1986, when PBPP starts, we are four years past the point where the US has essentially soft banned the use of domestic inmate blood. However, it continues to be used for export products. Cutter Laboratories, which is one of the companies involved in the nuts and bolts, parts of turning whole blood into like-blood products, publishes an internal memo around this time that highlights the attitude many in the industry had to the idea of excluding prison plasma donations. There are no data to support the emotional arguments that prison plasma collected from adequately screened prisoners is bad.

• 16:59Robert Evans?

  To exclude such plasma from manufacture of our coagulation product would only be a sop or a gratuity to the gay rights movement and would pressage further pressure to exclude plasma collected from the Mexican border and the paid donor.

• 17:14Robert Evans?

  Say it one more time.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Just say it one more time.

• 17:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. To exclude such plasma from manufacture of our coagulation product would only be a sopor gratuity to the gay rights movement and would pressage further pressure to exclude plasma collected from the Mexican border and the paid donor.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, yeah. Will someone think about-

• 17:33Robert Evans?

  We'll make less money if we have to use blood that isn't taken coercively by people who have an incentive to lie about whether or not they're sick. And again, when I talk about there being a lot more money, like what, what PVP is making is the initial money for selling this plasma, right? And both the plasma and the whole blood that's coming in through these donation programs are worth a shitload more once you spin them out into the different blood factors, right? So this, there's a whole higher level of profit that these companies like Cutter are making, right? Likewise, you know, the US has said, "We're not using this stuff domestically for medicine." And likewise, our foreign friends in the UK and Canada don't allow blood from prison inmates to be used in medicine.

• 18:18Robert Evans?

  But a system had been devised to ensure plausible deniability. The blood that came out of Cummins and other donor programs in the US was sold to Continental Pharma Chino in Montreal, and this major blood broker resells the whole blood in plasma all around the world. And it also sells to a Toronto-based company, Connet Laboratories, who effectively played the role of blood launderer and sent this tainted blood to the Canadian Red Cross. The laundering process was so effective that, as Sophia Chase writes, "In at least one case, the blood was sent back to the United States." So we are also using tainted blood in the US from inmates, even though we're not supposed to be, because it's being sold to Canada and then sold back to us, sometimes, like-

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Excuse me, excuse me, waiter, send this blood back.

• 19:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, send this one back across the border to our good friends.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Also, blood launderer as a job?

• 19:13Robert Evans?

  This is blood laundering, yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  We're in the wrong business.

• 19:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, oh, there's so much money laundering blood. Oh, man.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Do you ever think about that?

• 19:22Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. I do, I do. You know, I have a shitload of blood in my house. I keep it in-

• 19:26Speaker 01

  People always say that.

• 19:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I keep it in my basement. I don't know if it needs to be refrigerated, but, you know, make me an offer, folks. If you need a shitload of blood, I got it.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Cool stores, cool blood stored in a dark place.

• 19:41Robert Evans?

  Cool zone is getting into the blood business.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  So.

• 19:46Robert Evans?

  You're legally not allowed to ask me where it came from.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's illegal for you guys to ask Robert that.

• 19:52Robert Evans?

  It's important. It's so important, we can't know.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's also important to realize that the fewer questions you ask, the bigger of a price break you get.

• 20:01Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  And that seems to be an unfortunate truth as this, we could even call it a sort of blood economy.

• 20:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Begins to arise.

• 20:12Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. And speaking of the economy, I don't know if our sponsors sell blood, but they sell other stuff. So go buy it and then give me your blood.

• 20:23Speaker 04

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• 21:27Robert Evans?

  We're back. So even under PBPP, this new company, the same problems persisted. Prisoners continue to be involved in running the plasma program. They regularly overbleed each other because it means more money for them. And neither the prison system nor the company has a financial interest in stopping that. Records are regularly falsified and destroyed. Earlier in these episodes, we quoted from Clinton friend and prison board member Bobby Roberts. He's been something of a whistleblower about the program, but just to an extent. When the FDA published a study alleging that prison plasma was likelier to be tainted with blood than plasma donated elsewhere, Roberts told reporters from the Arkansas Times this. "I deny the premise. I disagree that prison

• 22:09Robert Evans?

  plasma blood was more dangerous than it was coming out of the for-profit centers in the free world. Out there, anybody could bleed anybody." And like, but the problem isn't everyone has blood. The problem is that it's not being checked and there's a lot of incentives to lie when you're sick, when you have no other way of making money because you're in prison, right? Like-

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Also, you can't just say, "I disagree with the premise."

• 22:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like the FDA, you're not, you're Bobby Roberts. For one thing, your name's Bobby Roberts. Immediately, I'm less likely to take you seriously about medical science. Both of your names are the same.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  I just, I love the idea-

• 22:48Robert Evans?

  Bob Rob.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Of Bob Rob pulling a hot tag base on something where, you know, like, this guy might get arrested with a bunch of guns with the serial numbers filed off, and they're like, "Hey, we got you with a bunch of guns, you know, in your Honda Civic." And he's like, "Officer, I disagree with the premise."

• 23:08Robert Evans?

  I disagree with the premise. That article continues to summarize Roberts's argument. Roberts bases his confidence in the state's plasma program on the fact that unlike downtown plasma centers, the ADC had medical records on every inmate who participated. "It knew who was safe to bleed," he says, "and who wasn't."

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Can we take a second, though, also?

• 23:31Robert Evans?

  Come on, man.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  The use of the word bleed like this is just so fucking creepy.

• 23:37Robert Evans?

  Safe to bleed, right to bleed, yes.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:40Robert Evans?

  No, he's right. The prison has records.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 23:44Robert Evans?

  And it often knows when people have bloodborne illnesses. The issue is that they don't care. Per the paper written by Sophia Chase, multiple witnesses to the events claimed that the plasma center accepted some donations from prisoners known to fail the required qualifications. A previous inmate, Louis Sorrels, described the conditions at the prison. You had prisoners bribing prisoners, prisoners bribing officials, officials offering certain deals for them to bleed for extra money or drugs. Sorrels himself passed away from hepatitis C shortly after the interview. He became infected with this disease during his time at Cummins Prison. And because of the previous scandals under HMA, there are more outside investigations into the plasma program after this point. A few years after PBPP takes over,

• 24:29Robert Evans?

  an FDA inspector reports them for poor screening procedures and record keeping. The prison officials who managed the program for PBPP were also accused of using prison guards to recruit inmates. Despite this, in an interview with a local reporter, prison medical director John Bias, who is like, you know, like the medical director of the prison, right? Said this, "We plan to stick with the plasma program to the last day, to the last drop we're able to sell."

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 25:00Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 25:01Robert Evans?

  Why? Given all of the bad stuff, why?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  It sounds like, uh, it sounds like one of those things where the public wider audience is somehow different from the specific audience this guy is speaking to.

• 25:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  He might be given some guarantees.

• 25:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Now, in 1991, a company from New York takes the contract from PBPP and they continue to mine prisoners for blood plasma until 1994. By this point, not only was the HIV crisis more fully understood, but the consequences of all those years of tainted blood getting shotgunned out onto the world market had become undeniable. And this is where we get to the body count. Best as we can tell, more than 1,000 Canadian hemophiliacs were dosed with tainted blood from Cummins Prison alone. During this timeframe, 42,000 Canadians were infected with hepatitis C and thousands more with HIV through tainted plasma, often including

• 26:04Robert Evans?

  plasma imported from Cummins. Current estimates expect about 7,000 total deaths of Canadian citizens from contaminated blood sold by the US during this period, about two 9/11s, a little more.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  And, and to be clear, these are all, for everyone listening, these are all innocent people who are-

• 26:22Robert Evans?

  Yes, easily preventable deaths, too. Yes.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Easily preventable deaths. Also, this is medicine that they need to live.

• 26:30Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes. And the shockwaves in Canada. Canada takes substantial action here, right? The Canadian Red Cross has to declare bankruptcy and is no longer allowed to collect blood as a result of the fallout of this. The Canadian government launched a commission in 1995 to trace the blood that had poisoned so many of their citizens, which is how we first learned that Canada's blood supply had been tainted by blood from sick US prison inmates, right? They trace a lot of it back to Cummins. Connaught Laboratories, which is the Canadian company that's like making the blood product, was obviously proven negligent in all this, largely because they had avoided checking any of the plasma collection sites themselves and had relied on FDA records which were also deficient. Subsequent investigations

• 27:12Robert Evans?

  showed that Arkansas, it's a little bit like, if you've heard the story of like the Rust shooting, right? Where like, the first AD, assistant director, was supposed to check the gun to see if it was empty, alongside the armorer was also supposed to check the gun to see if it was empty. And the first AD didn't really do a check because he assumed the armorer had done it, right? And the armorer had not done it. It's like that, right? Like Connaught was just like, "The FDA's probably got it. We don't need to spend any money checking." And like, they really did. The FDA didn't have it, you know?

• 27:44Robert Evans?

  Subsequent investigation showed that Arkansas prison blood was a significant contributor to Canada's Hep C and HIV crisis in this period, and that both US blood brokers and the FDA failed to inform Canadian companies where the blood they were buying had come from, and that much of it was being sent from facilities which had already been linked to tainted blood sales. There have been attempts at lawsuits over this, but the difficulties of carrying out such a suit cross-border have mostly stymied the efforts of Canadian hemophiliacs to get justice. As I discussed earlier, a good deal of the tainted blood from the US also went to Great Britain, where it helped cause what Lord Robert Winston described as "the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS."

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Oh!

• 28:26Robert Evans?

  All thanks to our American friends.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 28:31Robert Evans?

  The worst!

• 28:32Speaker 01

  The young upstarts.

• 28:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, our shitty cousins crap the bag once again.

• 28:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. From that article by Sophia Chase, "Most of the victims believe the blood and clotting factors they were using came from British donors. The possibility that the blood might have been imported did not even occur to them, much less the prospect that it might not meet British health standards. The disaster left 4,670 British hemophiliacs infected with hepatitis C, and 1,243 of those were also infected with HIV. About 2,000 have died at this point, right? Also, many of them spread diseases to partners and children. We'll never fully have an understanding of the exact cause, but at least 2,000 dead." And again, there were like, you know, investigations into this as well. Quote, "It ultimately determined that, A, a significant burden of responsibility for

• 29:23Robert Evans?

  tainted blood provided to British hemophiliacs rests on American suppliers of factor VIII concentrate." Now, due to the way things were done at the time, it was not possible to determine how many of those deaths were directly linked to Cummins Prison. Again, there have been changes in how stuff is reported to try and make it easier to trace back tainted blood, but that didn't exist at the time. We know at least three, right? So we know it was happening. It's gotta be thousands more than that, right? Because it's incredibly hard to actually trace this, right? In part because, one of the things they found when they realized how many British people had gotten HIV and hepatitis and were dying, they found that most of the records for blood transactions to import blood into the UK had been shredded in the early 1990s.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Accidentally.

• 30:09Robert Evans?

  Oops.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Oops.

• 30:12Robert Evans?

  Surely, surely nothing shady there.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Right, right. You, have you ever found yourself in that situation?

• 30:19Robert Evans?

  Oh, gosh.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Whoopsie doodles.

• 30:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Whoops. You, you just trip with a stack of papers and fall, fall toward the shredder.

• 30:28Robert Evans?

  I'm always shredding medical documents. That's like 80% of my day job is shredding medical documents from the UK. I don't even know what they're about, you know? They just send them to me in boxes and I just shred.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  That's how you and I got started before this whole podcasting thing. We would just hang out and throw some, uh, stuff into shredders and qualify each other.

• 30:49Robert Evans?

  That's the future of media, shredding British medical paperwork.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We weren't entirely wrong, but we had too much blood back then.

• 30:57Robert Evans?

  We had, we did have way too much blood.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:00Robert Evans?

  So it may seem baffling that like there was not more oversight, given the way things work with the NA, especially at this point worked at the NHS, but the blood export industry in the UK was considered uniquely favored, right? Which means they were exempt from some of the same oversight because number one, and this is the same in Canada, not nearly enough British people or Canadians were donating blood. They just didn't have enough. And the US was considered the gold standard planet wide for blood distribution because no one else could gather and disseminate anywhere. Again, 70% of the blood products worldwide coming from the US. No one else is even close. So everyone is just like, they

• 31:44Robert Evans?

  must have this shit figured out, right? No. But yeah, but because our system was the largest by far, everyone relied on it and became the global standard and other national healthcare agencies and companies just sort of assumed that US regulators had our shit together because the only other option was to not have enough blood. Now, that's the bulk of this story, but.

• 32:10Robert Evans?

  Before we close out here, I should talk about something. So there is apparently an exceptional documentary made about all this called Factor Eight, The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal. Yes. It was made by Kelly Duda, a filmmaker and investigative journalist who won a Peabody Award in 2003 for a Japanese documentary about the cover-up by the government of a Hep C epidemic. She spent eight years researching and five years filming this movie, which prompted an international response, and even she gets called into a criminal trial in Naples for a company accused of selling tainted blood products to Italian citizens. It's supposed to be excellent. I haven't seen it, and I wanted to. It is not available anywhere online that I can find.

• 32:51Robert Evans?

  When you look on Reddit and stuff, it will be, it's always blamed on the Clintons, right? That like, they stopped this documentary from getting out. I know that Duda has alleged she received harassment and stuff while she was making the documentary. That said, when you talk about the bad things the Clintons did, this is, especially Bill, an incredibly powerful man who was involved in a lot of shady stuff. There's also a whole industry of right-wing content dedicated to lying about shit, including the Clinton murder list and stuff. It's just nonsense, right? So it's difficult to parse a lot of stuff out. Now, there is no doubting that Bill Clinton deserves a massive degree of blame for the Arkansas blood scandal because he was the governor and because he put people who were

• 33:35Robert Evans?

  close to him directly in positions to manage the program. No argument, period, that he does not deserve a meaningful amount of blame for this, right? But a lot of these other allegations, right? Like, the fact that are the Clintons locking down access? Have they used their influence? It's like, I mean, it's not a, powerful people do that with documentaries, but also a lot of the time, I'm doing episodes, I found out there's a 20-year-old documentary about it, and I can't find that documentary because it's not on streaming. That just happens with media. So like, is the likelyest thing, the Clintons locked? I don't, I don't, I have no evidence of that, right? I've had this happen to a bunch of documentaries over the years.

• 34:17Robert Evans?

  That said, I would love to see this documentary, so if you've got it.

• 34:25Robert Evans?

  Hit us up. And I don't know, someone put it on fucking streaming. Now, the most credible allegations that I have heard, when it comes to like, you know, the corruption here, is that money from this blood program was used to provide positions to people as political favors where they could profit while doing very little. And it's certainly true that the State Department of Corrections doesn't make a ton from the blood program, right? However, other people in and around the state government make an unknown amount of money acting as grease around HMA and then PBVP's wheels here. One example is Leonard Dunn. That is the law, that is the guy who gets brought in to run HMA right around the time of the first blood scandal. He's a banker. A state police investigator wrote that Dunn had advised him, quote, "He was close to

• 35:09Robert Evans?

  Governor Clinton as well as a majority of state politicians presently in office." Mr. Dunn explained that he was very fond of politics. Dunn added that he was "the financial portion of the corporation as well as the political arm." Despite this, he also claimed he "never took an active role in the company on a day-to-day basis." Okay, man.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 35:29Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Good story, bro.

• 35:32Robert Evans?

  But Dunn does handle, when HMA loses the contract briefly, he is the guy negotiating with the corrections board so that it can keep taking and selling plasma. And since his company had just paid out to the FDA for letting tainted blood out of the country, you might imagine these would be difficult negotiations. But the main result of these negotiations was that Dunn, in order to get the corrections board to agree, agreed to bring in an ombudsman to act as a compliance coordinator to ensure HMA followed the rules going forward. This ombudsman was Richard Mays, a Little Rock judge who had been appointed by Governor Clinton. His job at HMA was described by the state police as "a bribe."

• 36:14Robert Evans?

  Because again, he's not really doing anything. They're just like, yeah, just give another guy who like, we owe a favor a job and pay him some money. He doesn't have to do much.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's make our, let's make it official with our bud.

• 36:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Now you're an alms bud.

• 36:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right. Yeah. Now, the specific choice to bring on Dunn seems to have been made by the Arkansas Board of Corrections Chairman Woodson Walker, who claimed that he discussed it with Governor Clinton, who was so upset that he held Walker personally responsible for the next provider chosen. And Walker and Clinton jointly suggested Mays, right? That's, that's what Walker claims. You know, obviously he's in trouble here. So, but you know, the fact that this guy who Clinton appoints as a judge becomes, gets this bribe job, I don't think Clinton had nothing to do with that. To quote from Suzy Parker's article, HMA President Dunn told investigators, Dunn stated that Walker advised him that Mays

• 37:07Robert Evans?

  was black, a plus in a system where most of the inmates are black, had good qualifications, and was an outstanding attorney, according to investigators' notes.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  I like the order of operations.

• 37:17Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  With those commendations.

• 37:19Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Like, oh, and third, he's pretty good.

• 37:22Robert Evans?

  He's a good lawyer. Yeah.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's all right at that one. But first.

• 37:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, obviously, I am, I'm not saying he's not a good attorney, but he's, doesn't have qualifications, qualifications to monitor a blood plasma donation program. Yeah, like, that's like saying, you know, this guy's a great helicopter pilot. Let's put him in charge of making sure all the hearts we give, put in people are, are working. It's like, he doesn't know how to do that. Like, yeah, he's good at something.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  You haven't seen him on the bird.

• 37:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Man, the way this guy flies, he could really pick out a good kidney.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  You could just, it's something in the eyes.

• 37:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  It's a vibe.

• 38:00Robert Evans?

  Simply not the same job. Now, there are other allegations of kickbacks and bribery at high levels in the system. Mike Galster was a medical practitioner who worked in Cummins Prison during the height of the HMA days, and he later wrote a fictionalized novel about his experiences and claimed that he had to leave the company after an HMA associate demanded he give some of his earnings to him in order to keep his job. Quote, "The way Arkansas works is that once you are working within the system, the people in charge make it clear that it is a privilege to have that state contract. Ultimately, you are expected to pay for that privilege. This I know," Galster continues. "Without the governor's support and protection, this disease-riddled system would have been shut down by 1982." Again, Clinton doesn't make the system this way, but he is a guy who continues to work

• 38:44Robert Evans?

  within a system in order to get the stuff done that he wants to get done, right? And the fact that that system existed before and after him does not exempt him from responsibility for participating in it.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Nor exonerate, to be quite honest. And I love the point that we're bringing up here about how easy it is to heap a probrium on someone that you already don't care for or disagree with. But just like the soul-crushing thing where someone you hate makes a really good point objectively, you also have to have that moment where even someone you might like does really just unclean evil shit for a federal judge to say there are evil people involved.

• 39:29Robert Evans?

  Yes. And it's this, the issue of both, like, it is important to hold Clinton's, I mean, he didn't, no one held his feet, but it would have been important for them to have done this as a result of this. It's also important for it not to be what a lot of people tried to make it, where it's like, well, this is purely a Clinton scandal. Now, I mean, this is like an Arkansas scandal, it's like a blood industry scandal, this is a lot of very important, and if you're picking out one of the threads involved in this scandal, then you're ignoring all of the other ones and you're like, it becomes clear, okay, well, you hate Governor Clinton, but like, if a governor you didn't hate had been doing all of the same things, you wouldn't have given a shit, you know?

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would have been like, you know, people like blood.

• 40:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, these are systemic issues and we both need to blame and punish individual people responsible for them and understand how the systemic part plays into it so that we don't just put like, well, no, I like this governor, so I'm just not going to pay attention to what's being done in the Arkansas prisons anymore, you know?

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Maybe the problem is monetizing everything.

• 40:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe the problem is monetizing everything. Like those early reports said, if you make blood donation be entirely driven by money, there's a lot of issues you have to deal with. The other issue is like, well, then how do we get all the blood we need? Because like, we don't have enough, there's never enough. How do, how do we get the blood we need?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's never an organ surplus.

• 40:52Robert Evans?

  Right. And so there's a degree to which like, as much as we're critiquing parts of this, there are certain things I know that we shouldn't have been doing, like running a blood program the way they did at Cummins Prison. But when it comes to like, how do we get enough blood? Well, nobody's figured that out yet. I don't know.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Nobody's figured that out except for, except for Robert Evans, creator of Behind the Bastards, who has several jars of, we'll call it gently used vintage blood.

• 41:22Robert Evans?

  Gently used, blinted vintage blood, maybe a little bit of lamb's blood in there. I might have, might have thinned it out with some coconut milk. You're good, you're good, take it.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  You're good, no refunds. Also contains X amount of ethanol.

• 41:34Robert Evans?

  Now, you know who else doesn't give refunds?

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Who's that?

• 41:37Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of this podcast.

• 41:39Speaker 06

  That we're hoping to keep, Robert.

• 41:42Robert Evans?

  Maybe they give refunds, I don't know, I never check.

• 41:46Speaker 04

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• 42:49Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, a good deal of the information in this article comes from a 1998 piece published by Arkansas investigative journalist Suzy Parker. She also published an article on the Whitewater scandal for the New York Times, which was a big scandal for the Clintons while he was in office that like is incredibly boring today because political scandals have gotten so much worse. Like, it's so quaint that like, oh man, remember when people were upset about these like shady business dealings the president might be tied to? Good lord!

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Guys, this dude may have made a couple hundred thousand dollars illegally. So, let's rebuild those guillotines.

• 43:28Robert Evans?

  Anyway, the president said he's a king. It's just, things are a lot worse. I'm not saying Whitewater was okay, I'm just saying like, things are so much worse now.

• 43:38Robert Evans?

  Suzy has worked for a number of publications and she has a particular fixation on Arkansas politics and the Clintons. Today, she runs a local independent publication called The Reckoning, and she is quite conservative, right? She is a right-wing, at least similarly more sympathetic to that. I think she does portray Clinton's involvement as like more direct and puppet mastery than it was. I think this was something Clinton acceded to, both because he gained some benefit from like, you know, giving some of these positions to people close to him, and because not messing with this allowed him to do, it was like a politics was a trade for him, right? Whereas like the other people running the Board of Corrections and running these, these were the people who were like directly setting up the system like this. Again, I think Clinton knew quite a bit of how bad this was and

• 44:23Robert Evans?

  made some choices here, but he's not the puppet master, right? Now, one of the issues here comes that alongside some strong connections, which again, don't imply that Clinton operated this program, but do in clay that he was, he deserves quite a lot of blame.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Or at least, at least willfully ignorant.

• 44:42Robert Evans?

  Yes. There's also some specious allegations. For example, Galster, that former doctor, claims that Vince Foster was hired to squash the state investigation. Now, this was true, and Vince Foster is a very close Clinton associate. If this is true, that investigation- Happened and in fact described some of what was going on as bribery. And then there's an independent review ordered by the prison board, which had Clinton allies on it. So I don't know. I don't know how much I believe that this is like a big deal. But the reason this is seen as a smoking gun, right? By some people is that in July of 1993, after Governor Clinton became President Clinton, Vince Foster shot himself to death in Washington DC. Foster had discussed his depression with his sister over some time and he was at that moment

• 45:25Robert Evans?

  in a lot of trouble over a totally different controversy with the White House Travel Office. And there's no evidence of anything here other than that Vince was a serial political operator who was involved in some shady shit and got disgraced and who killed himself because he didn't want to live with the after effects, right? And you know, this is that also the shit he was in, to the extent that it was shady, is very common among people who are Arkansas politicos, right? But Vince's death has become a cornerstone of some of the more unhinged parts of the anti-Clinton movement. You'll hear allegations that like he was either murdered by the Clintons or that he killed himself because of the blood scandal, right? The Clintons had him shot in order to to cover this blood scandal up. And again, it wasn't covered up. There was a documentary on it.

• 46:10Robert Evans?

  People didn't care enough, uh, but it wasn't, you know, it got out. And the reality is that the blood scandal didn't have an impact on Bill and Hillary's lives or political careers, not in a real massive way. And I can't in fact believe that people as connected as they are, you know, have contacts in the entertainment industry, but I also, I just don't see the the evidence that this destroyed them or that this wasn't that dangerous to them.

• 46:35Robert Evans?

  In fact, in 1992, Peter Longstaff, who tested positive for HIV back in 1995, after receiving blood from US donors, tested positive for hepatitis C. And this was the same year that Clinton ran for presidential election. The Arkansas Times writes, quote, "His former chief of staff, Betsy Wright, sent a memo titled 'Prison Positives.' That memo mentioned four points, including 'Education into prison' by Bill Clinton. But the first point Wright listed was 'Run cheapest system in the country.'" And so you kind of get even in 92, you know, the, the thing that like the scandal here is not on their front burner. Their front burner is still for him in 92. After it's very clear how bad a lot of this is, was like, no, the prison system was cheap.

• 47:20Robert Evans?

  Let's throw that in a bullet point list, you know? You know, it's a thing to run on, right?

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Keeping costs down.

• 47:27Robert Evans?

  Keeping costs down.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Is the idea.

• 47:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, fairly normal evil, fairly normal politics evil as opposed to like incredibly shady conspiracy evil. That's my opinion on the matter.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Well, I I hear you there too, because there's there's this devilishly tempting draw, right, to to find a political force you disagree with, or you already don't care for, and then assign them supervillainous agency where the, you know, the result is, without being too controversial, the result is, you ultimately have to ask yourself, is there any such thing as a completely clean POTUS, right? And what does it take to play that game? Yeah.

• 48:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and well, and also, just like, perhaps if we keep, if the focus of all of these problems is like, ah, this is, I can use this huge systemic issue that a lot of people deserve to go down for, to attack this one guy. That's all I'm really interested in. I'm not interested in better treatment for prisoners. I'm not interested in a safer blood treatment system, right? And likewise, if you're, and to the same extent that like, Bill's only interest in what happened in the prison system during his time was, I need a bullet point of things that I can run on, right? And like, yeah, I put some educational programs in. System was the cheapest, you know, than it's ever been. Bada bing bada boom, I'm done thinking about the prisons in the state I run, you know? Like, all of

• 49:03Robert Evans?

  these are parts of the, the, the, why all of this kind of shit will keep happening.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yes, and that is, I think, one of our, look, I know it's your show, but I think that's one of the key takeaways is, it is, it is tempting, again, to look at the headline, to put a face on a problem, right? Now I'm mad, insert individual here. The real problems are systemic and have always been and shall always be so, be so. And with that,

• 49:37Speaker 01

  I gotta tell you, it's a question that's been on my mind for both of these episodes. Robert, do you wanna, do you wanna like buy some blood?

• 49:45Robert Evans?

  Yes, oh my god, yes. Do you, I gotta, I wanna make sure, will I have any idea where the blood comes from? Or what is in it?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Even better, bro, you're not buying it, we do a subscription service.

• 49:58Robert Evans?

  Oh shit, awesome, awesome.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  You know, you're, well, we say leasing.

• 50:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I'll lease the blood, I'll give some back, yeah, perfect, you know?

• 50:09Robert Evans?

  We gotta have, blood leasing has to be on the organ lease, I mean, we're all going to be doing our best for the next several decades to like recreate some of like the silliest movies from the 1990s, I think Repo Man's next.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, I'm so excited, you have to, you have to come back on, uh, stuff that wants you, or you've never been on that one, come back on Ridiculous History, uh, while we can still call it history.

• 50:35Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 06

  I feel like, I feel like the Rent a Blood is just like a sequel to Jordan Peele's Get Out.

• 50:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, Jordan got us again.

• 50:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 50:49Robert Evans?

  Um, anyway, rent some blood, have fun.

• 50:54Robert Evans?

  I don't know why I ended on that mark, what, what do you, I mean, you kinda did a plug.

• 50:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, Ben, plug some plugs, please.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, uh, sure, other than Rent a Blood, which is clearly our main focus, uh, for both of these episodes, uh, please check out Stuff That'll Want You To Know, which applies critical thinking to allegations of conspiracy, please check out Ridiculous History, where you can hear our own friend, Robert Evans, Robert Paws Evans, you like that? Just check it, uh, the social security number beep on the, uh, on the show a couple of times, uh, mo- most importantly, uh, most importantly, I think you guys plugged something? I'm just throwing the ball over the court here, just doing like a halftime, go for it, you know what I mean?

• 51:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Half court.

• 51:46Robert Evans?

  Find the documentary Factor Eight so I can watch it, that's what I'm gonna plug, somebody's gotta have it out there.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Shout out to Kelly Duda, by the way, for Standing Tall in Italian Court, that's a true story.

• 51:57Robert Evans?

  Good work, uh, anyway, that's the episode.

• 52:05Speaker 06

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

• 52:30Speaker 03

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