I Beat COVID-19. But I Can’t Donate My Blood for Research Because I’m Gay.

The Mother Jones Podcast

Mother Jones

Scoops, News, Politics, Investigations, Elections, Journalism

4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens inside your body after you recover from COVID-19? What are the chances that survivors will develop immunity? And how should the legions of soon-to-be recovered think about their usefulness—to scientists and society—in this altered world? These questions got very personal for the Mother Jones Podcast team after our executive producer, James West, tested positive for COVID-19. James is recovering and feeling better. Now, as a survivor, he wants answers to questions that are of great importance—to himself, to doctors, to researchers, and to a planet fighting a pandemic. Is he immune to the disease? If so, for how long? Can he donate his plasma to exciting new trials? How close are doctors to finding a vaccine? In this episode, you’ll hear James’s conversation with Kamal Khanna, an immunity specialist at NYU School of Medicine. You’ll also learn about the FDA’s antiquated restriction on plasma donations, and how the stigma from a past pandemic are hurting our chances of fighting this one. You’ll also here from Peter Staley, the veteran AIDS activist whose groundbreaking work helped erode medical and regulatory barriers to fight HIV. He talks about how to channel the rage you might be feeling about political inaction into lasting change, while dishing on private dinners with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Mother Jones Podcast. I'm Jamila King in Brooklyn.
0:04.5	On today's show, on today's show.
0:07.5	On today's show, surviving COVID-19. Our own producer James West is here with his own story.
0:21.0	You'll hear about what we know right now about the science of recovery
0:25.7	and what's next for this growing group of people around the world. And the
0:31.6	lessons from people who survived outbreaks before,
0:35.0	how to harness the outrage and why there's hope and anger.
0:39.5	From someone who's fought for all of us before, a veteran AIDS activist.
0:45.0	That's all on today's show.
0:49.0	Stay tuned. And I'm happy to hear that you're on your road to recovery.
0:56.0	James West, welcome back to the show and I'm happy to hear that you're on your road to recovery.
1:03.4	Jamila, I miss you and the whole team and I feel so much better.
1:08.7	It's so good to be back at work.
1:10.7	So let's start with the beginning of this for you. There's a lot of
1:14.4	uncertainty and paranoia floating around right now. When did you suspect that you
1:19.4	might really have COVID-19? It was about two weeks ago now, sore throat, coughing, some chills, some of the
1:27.3	classic signs of it. And I want to stress to our listeners that my version of this has been quite manageable and mild and a lot of people
1:37.2	are going through a lot worse than I did. So I just want to foreground that as we talk about this because I don't want people to get the wrong idea that this is easy to get over.
1:47.0	This wasn't fun and while my own symptoms verged on the more mild end of this spectrum.
1:53.6	There were periods where I was scared,
1:57.7	and there were periods where I would sort of crash
2:01.2	into these cycles of mind-muddying tiredness. The fatigue was a real part of this.
	...

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