A "haunting" (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can't Even) and deeply
personal investigation of an underground for-profit medical industry and
the American underclass it drains for blood and profit.
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 1990s
and early 2000s struck thousands with blood-borne diseases as
impoverished areas of the country were milked for blood with reckless
abandon. Instead, McLaughlin becomes her own runner, hiding American
plasma in her luggage during trips from the United States to China. She
finishes the 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. She 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 exposé 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.
