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Between World War II and the outbreak of AIDS in the early 1980s, Americans with hemophilia enjoyed what Elaine DePrince calls a "golden moment." Once life-threatening "bleeds" could be controlled with injections of "clotting factors" manufactured from blood plasma. Hemophiliacs' life expectancy soared. Their range of activity, at work and play, broadened.
Things weren't perfect. For example, a person who used clotting factors had almost a 100% chance of catching hepatitis. Pharmaceutical companies (Alpha, Armour, Baxter and Bayer, and their subsidiaries) made the stuff from plasma "pooled" from tens of thousands of donors, including Haitians, prison inmates and residents of drug-ridden slums. Just one infected donor could contaminate a whole batch of clotting factor with virus.
Couldn't a hemophiliac who caught hepatitis from impure blood products sue the manufacturer? Well, no. Legislatures in 47 states--California was the first, in 1955--quietly adopted "blood-shield laws" that exempted makers of blood products from the "strict product liability" that applies to makers of such things as automobiles and toys. Under these laws, manufacturers could sue their sources of tainted plasma, but patients couldn't sue the manufacturers.
The doctors who treated hemophiliacs, and their own advocacy group, the National Hemophilia Foundation, advised them that the benefits of...