Old Blood Donors' List Viral as Plasma Donors Amid COVID Pandemic

The list contains names, blood groups and phone numbers of roughly 64 so-called plasma donors.

A message falsely claiming to be a list of people ready to donate plasma in India is being shared over social media amid the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we found that this is actually an old list of blood donors, which is unrelated to coronavirus and dates back to at least 2015.

CLAIM

The list, which contains names, blood groups and phone numbers of roughly 64 so-called plasma donors is being shared on platforms as a response to people asking for plasma donations or simply as awareness notices amid the pandemic.

Plasma therapy, which uses the plasma of recovered COVID-19 patients, is one of the investigational therapies being tried in India as part of the effort to fight the virus. Recovered COVID patients' immune systems may have created antibodies that fight the novel coronavirus. These antibodies build up and can be found in plasma, the liquid part of blood.

We found that the message was being shared on Twitter and Facebook by various people. One person shared it claiming it was a list for people in Mumbai, while one person replying to this Facebook post claimed it was a list of people in Delhi-NCR.

Another Twitter post can be seen here, and archived here.

We also found the same list being shared on a blog as a bank of contact numbers for plasma donors, which was in turn shared on Facebook.

WHAT WE FOUND

On running several keyword searches, we found that the same list, with minor variations in some names, has been shared on Facebook since at least December 2015. We found the same post dated 5 December 2015 on a page called The New Face of Society.

Since then, it has been shared on a Facebook page called BLOOD DONOR S on 9 September, 2016 and by a Facebook user on 17 September, 2019.

We also found that it was posted on 21 October 2016 with some variations on a blog called I Love Trichy, on a website called Telangana Journalists three years ago with the note that it was for Hyderabad and on Medium.com on 10 November 2017 as a list of blood donors in Chennai.

While many of the numbers on the list were non-functional or did not exist, The Quint was able to get in touch with four people on the list who confirmed that they were blood donors based in Chennai. Two of them said that they had also donated blood in recent months.

V Mohan, one of the people named in the list, told The Quint that this was a group of blood donors based in Chennai, which had been made two or three years ago and said that it had nothing to do with plasma donation in the COVID context.

“This list has been wrongly forwarded as a plasma donor list. So many of the volunteers have been getting calls about plasma donation that some have even had to change their numbers. Please don’t forward as plasma donors, we are all normal blood donors.”

V Mohan

Therefore, it is clear that an old list of blood donors is being circulated as that of plasma donors in context of the coronavirus pandemic.

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