July 2024 Book Commentary: Blood Money

The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry by Kathleen McLaughlin
Book Cover: Blood Money

Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood
Industry
By Kathleen McLaughlin

Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare
autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable.

So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a-
year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing an industry that targets
America’s most economically vulnerable for immense profit.
Assigned to work in China, McLaughlin hesitated to utilize that country’s scandal-
plagued plasma supply – outbreaks throughout the ’90s and early 2000s struck thousands with
blood-borne diseases as impoverished areas of the country were milked for blood with reckless
abandon. Instead, McLaughlin became her own runner, hiding American plasma in her luggage
during trips from the United States to China. She finishes her job but never could get the
plasma story out of her head. Suspicions become certainties when a source from the past, a
visiting Chinese researcher, warns McLaughlin of troubling echoes between America’s domestic
plasma supply chain and the one she’d seen spin out into chaos in China
Blood Money shares McLaughlin’s decade-long mission to learn the full story of where
her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human
blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit – a
human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for
retail across the globe. (Most developed nations prohibit paying people for blood or plasma yet
the U.S. sells more blood products to other countries than we do some of the world’s most
common farm goods.) McLaughlin investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies
have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin.
And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college
students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America’s southern
border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their
plasma for substandard pay.

McLaughlin’s findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this
wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the
suffering of others. Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin’s personal battle to overcome
illness as a working American with an electrifying expose of capitalism run amok in a searing
portrait that shows what happens when big business is allowed to feed unchecked on those
least empowered to fight back.

Kathleen McLaughlin is an award-winning journalist who reports and writes about the
consequences of economic inequality around the world. A frequent contributor to the
Washington Post and the Guardian, McLaughlin has also appeared in the New York Times,
BuzzFeed, the Atlantic, the Economist, NPR, and more. She is a former Knight Science
Journalism fellow at MIT and has won multiple awards for her reporting on labor in China.
Blood Money is her first book.